Artist Susanne Wellm works with photography as her primary medium. Since the 1990s 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.
Susanne Wellm is a 1995 graduate of The Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation, and has since 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 – Portland, Oregon, The Museum of Fine Arts – Houston. Texas, Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts - Japan.
Artist Statement
”Every photograph is the beginning of a story, the first frame of a movie”
- Wim Wenders
The primary object of my work has always been to capture experiences that are sensory; the small things I see and touch that give structure to my everyday life, things that strike a mood and bring shades to the way of life. In my work I am influenced by the art of film. In series of photographs I seek to convey the feeling, ambience or potential stories that I see in the objects, happenings and people around me. I often work with layers, mixing various techniques and different photographic media. This multifaceted way of working with photography is not necessarily aimed to strike the conceptual note of the medium so much as it is a way of reaching certain aesthetic and sensory qualities. Photography, with all its possibilities, becomes my way of capturing feelings and moods, while leaving it up to the viewer to add the final layer of the work.
