Susanne Wellm
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Selected Works
Humble eyes, 2023-2024
This serie is based on the idea of a person's movement through urban landscapes, intimate close spaces and inner thoughts and feelings. Susanne Wellm blends these elements into stories that to the viewer are imaginary stories and playful narratives.
Based on an extensive archive of found images from photo albums, historic books, stills from film history and her own footage, the artist draws connections between the personal dramas of everyday life and the collective history and trauma of modern Europe. Through the use of collage and montage, she piece together familiar and often unseen slices of reality into multi-layered, poetic pictorial spaces where fiction and fact, stillness and movement, interior and exterior merge in moments that cinematically suggest an action but are open to interpretation.
Susanne Wellm has developed a new method that lies in the field between photography and textile. More specifically, she experiments with combining photographic images with weaving to achieve and refine a new materiality, adding a special tactility and painterly sensibility.
The symbolism of the method of cutting and dissolving the image and then reassembling it by weaving it becomes a very concrete physical layer with strong symbolic hints.
The same happens when the artist uses cotton threads on some of the works by tying knots and gathering several colored threads as if something needs to be tied together.
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Biography
Biography
Danemark , 1965
"Photography, for me, is deeply linked to the evocation of certain emotions, it refers to blurred moments of memory: layers that can be added or removed, drawn from the deepest well. The most important thing for me is to preserve its mysterious aspect. To maintain a space that both artist and viewer can explore without necessarily finding concrete answers."
(Quote by the artist, from interview with Zoé Isle de Beauchaine for The Eye of Photography, May 17, 2024).
Artist Susanne Wellm works with photography as her primary medium. Graduate of The Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation in 1995, she has explored a wide array of photographic techniques, both analogue and digital, often artistically utilized in a merged form. Exploring the physical qualities of the two-dimensional image, she recently developed a method combining photography and weaving, adding complex, tactile layers of colour, contrast and depth to the expression of the pieces.
An omnipresent vein running through Wellm’s practice is her interest in time, memory and the construction of narrative. With a starting point of a vast archive of found imagery from old family albums, historical movie stills and original captures, Wellm draws connecting lines between the personal dramas of everyday life and the collective history and trauma of modern Europe. Through the use of collage and montage, she pieces together well-known, and often humble, sections of reality, into multi-layered, poetic pictorial spaces, wherein fiction and fact, stagnation and movement, the internal and the external melts together into acutely meaningful moments, cinematically mapping out an action, but all the while remaining open to interpretation. As such, hinting and unfinished, Wellm’s pieces instigate a reflection on our eternal search for meaning, within the tangled relations between ourselves and the world, between past and present.
"Humble Eyes", title of the serie of works presented here, refers to looking at the world with humility and gratitude, perhaps also with a deeper and more intense way of looking at the fine details of everyday life. Taking time to reflect on the details and symbols in what you see, these details that are only seen when the pace shifts to slow motion in the hectic pace of modern life.
Susanne Wellm’s work is exhibited widely, nationally and internationally. Her works are represented in several significant collections, among them The Danish Arts Foundation, New Carlsberg Foundation, The Royal Library’s National Photo Collection, Art Museum Brandts, Vejle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts.The artist
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Exhibitions
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Press
