EMMA DE CLARIO
BIOGRAPHY


Emma de Clario is a practicing, Melbourne based visual artist.
Her work focuses entirely on exposing the inexplicable, broken and yet shining tenacity of the human spirit.

Emma has painted prolifically since she was a child. As both her parents are artists, and the environment that she grew up in was the unpredictable, fraught and 'free' 1970's, her experience of creative, visual expression had inexhaustible limitations.

Her interest in art, literature and the human condition, has informed her committed practice. That Emma is the full time mother of two young children, has deepened her inquiry into the relationship of 'the mother', the ferocity and parallel tenderness, the seeming immortality within this archetype.

In her practice, she attempts to expose that paradox of longing and fullness within us all; to uncover the voice in the silence of the metaphysical world.

In her first solo exhibition, she re-examined 100's of personal photographs.
In each image, she looked to find the 'lost' moment within herself.
Was she present at the time the shutter clicked?
Or was the photograph a record of a moment by which the conscious knowledge that the visual moment was 'recorded' gave her spirit the permission leave, with the understanding that she could see the photograph later?

In these particular photographs, where her 'presence' was gone, she then expands the space/time field paradox contained within these images by reconstructing their imagery through overlaying a newly painted surface, re experiencing the day, the moment, the photograph. Taking back into her that particular that was forsaken.

Beyond the location of found images Emma has increasingly used mobile phone technology to newly construct the images she seeks. Combining the instantaneous through the spontaneity of mobile phone photography and the time-based through the deliberateness of oil painting, Emma has managed to develop a practice that simultaneously proposes both the urgency of what must be at all costs conveyed and the silent language with which to express it.

Her first solo exhibition was presented at Melbourne’s Mario’s Cafe in 2005.
Since then she has held two solo exhibitions at the Anita Traverso Gallery in Melbourne, Australia and has participated in a number of group exhibitions.


Emma was showcased by the Anita Traverso Gallery in The Weekend Australian Art Fair 2008, held in Melbourne’s Exhibition Building, where her painting installation won The Renault New Generation Artist of the Year Award.

These are the written notes that accompanied her first solo exhibition titled ‘Deworlded’:

Through my lifetime I have collected a considerable number of postcards, trinkets and photographs, each mapping different lives. I identified in many of these a unique moment in time that will never be repeated. In this, their anonymity is sacred.

I paste these images to the flat surface of pieces of Australian red gum. This invites both my own memories and those belonging to others to share a common space. I then complete these images by painting over constructing a new and preferred reality. I have become conscious that by doing so I am asking, what is perfect? I have altered the light of springtime’s clear blue sky on some of the postcards and imposed upon the idyll my anxious darkness, my winter, my rage and my storm, by manifesting the strangely complex miracle of my human-ness.

In others I have created warm golden sunlight, sometimes a brilliant and glorious light where there was none, in an attempt to tame wild, barren places and saturate them instead with abundance and gratitude, perhaps with the sweetness of other worlds within me.

Destruction and decay, yearning life, desire, breath: I am all of these things.

There is a deep internal world within all of us, in which we keep memories and truths. To reach it we might need to alter parts of ourselves, perhaps even aspects of the perceived world - our histories, our regrets, our grief. We might need to de-world.

I am DEWORLDED.


These are the notes that accompanied ‘Necessary’, Emma’s solo exhibition at the Anita Traverso Gallery:

When we are witness to a view that is unexpected or overwhelming we immediately reach for our camera.

I have found that the moment my finger presses the button to capture the image, two things happen instantaneously; I immediately become numb to what is laid before me and at the very moment that the photograph has been taken I turn away and move on to other things, satisfied that I have saved the very Godliness of this vision for myself, and that it is safe and kept…My mind and heart is consequently instructed to postpone the deep and dangerous engagement with immediacy, with the glorious nourishment of the soul and I whisper to ourselves as I take the photograph: yes, you may reflect on the depth of the vision you have saved, but later. So do we, later? Mostly we do not. Indeed we cannot.

We cannot truly wonder the sheer drop of a cliff, the sweet desolation of a suburban park bench or the mysterious yearning of the ocean when we are not there. The experience becomes a different one altogether. Looking at a photograph we become a voyeur of another, more intimate moment, be it ours or someone else’s. In taking the photograph we deny ourselves the cathartic component of the experience of being in place, and without that moment of exhilaration we become nothing.

One night, a couple of winters ago, I began to consciously reclaim those moments. I very closely examined a number of photographs I had taken previously. But looking closely at the symbols representing those experiences wasn’t enough to re-enter them. I began to paint over them as a way of re-gaining the abdicated moment, and attempting to go inside the photographed instant. With paint I found that I was able to re-enter the place, I was able to go inside that photographed moment and be it.

Painting over the image slowly and deliberately allowed me the opportunity to engage deeply with it, perhaps more deeply that I might have when I originally pressed the camera’s button. Almost each single night over the last year or so I have actively worked to lift the haze off those relinquished moments of exhilaration; I have reclaimed these photographic images and pasted them onto pieces of Australian red gum* in order to take them back into myself.

The flesh of the red gum is the closest thing to my own flesh I could find. Once the images are pasted onto the wood’s surface they become skin of flesh, my flesh. I then paint them in order to bring them back to this instant, to this now.

And I believe that this reclaiming, this bringing-back-to-the-self each lost moment of exhilaration and tenderness is necessary.

Necessary not just for a survival, but for a deeply lived life.



These are the notes that accompanied Emma’s painting installation at ‘The Only Constant’, the inaugral group exhibition presented in 2007 at the Anita Traverso Gallery.
Her installation won the exhibition’s People’s Choice Award.

House-keeping; to keep a house.
To hold a place sacred and to mark it ours; safe and close.
Clean.
Shining, blessed, livable.
In keeping house we are systematically cultivating a conviction,
a confidence,
( a hope),
that everything serpentine and dark
will not enter and threaten
the order we have created there.
As we have always done.
Forever.

We keep the shelter
in which we feed and nurture our babies
strong
through every generation
and over each and every land.
A blind faith
that our arms are enough
and that our shelters are not vulnerable,
nor indefensible.
Our shelters are kept strong with hope
or with money.

Our arms are trusted
to act as needed
in either nurturing or defending.
With each act of familial protection
we are tending and building
our belief that all that is mercurial and uncertain
will find our sense of purpose
formidable enough,
glorious enough,
to keep away.
Through house keeping
we are holding close a belief
that our substantially
will afford us the simple faith
to constantly hold others close
and feed them;
in this lays our survival.


The following notes accompanied Emma’s solo exhibition titled ‘Stemmata’,
presented both at the Melbourne Art Fair, May 2008 and at the Anita Traverso Gallery, October, 2008.

‘Stemma (plural cversion: stemmata) is a simple eye, which is capable only of detecting light. Stemmata neither focus nor allow reception of images.

Stemmatics or stemmology takes its name from the stemma, or "family tree," developed in 1793–1851, which shows the relationships of the surviving witnesses of a family or event. That is, if two witnesses have a number of errors in common, it may be presumed that they were derived from a common intermediate source. The same process determines relations between the lost intermediates, placing all extant manuscripts in a family tree or stemma codicum descended from a single archetype. The process of constructing the stemma is called recension, or the Latin recensio

This work is made from photographs that I have taken with my mobile phone.
I have altered the images with oil paint, text and other varied methods.
I am making an attempt to reveal, as close as any human can, the visual hunger of the spirit whose sustenance is essential to facilitate union with something ‘other’. I have not travelled anywhere to specifically take these photos.
I have only captured what has been above us as I move about my life in my daily tasks.

Rarely in this society in which we live do we have the inclination or impulse to look up.

Above us is light.
Trees.
Alive and growing.
Surviving.
And dead, used by us to carry electricity (light and connection).
Reaching upward, Regardless.
Reminding us of what is passing and temporary.
And yet is essential to spiritual survival.
The only difference between looking and not looking
is the choice
to let the light in:
or not.’

The following is an edited version of the opening remarks made by Max Delaney, Director of the Monash University Museum of Art, on the occasion of Emma’s second solo exhibition at the Anita Traverso Gallery.

‘The remembrance of things past is at the heart of Emma de Clario’s marvellous photo-paintings. Emma’s exhibition is comprised of 108 family photographs, which have been mounted onto reclaimed red-gum, and carefully, lovingly, painted so that certain details are accentuated, heightened, re-animated. Emma had earlier undertaken a series of paintings on old postcards, and enjoyed their mood and nostalgic feeling. The intimacy of scale involved an equally intimate relationship between artist and viewer, which is again the case here.

If postcards usually represent public places, and public memory, Emma’s move from postcards to her personal collection of family photographs suggests a move to a more personal, private realm of memory and imagination. Memory is fragile and fugitive, partial and episodic. It involves moments of heightened recognition, and others of seemingly arbitrary significance.

Photos are also related to memory, albeit as slices of life, frozen in time. Emma invites the viewer to explore the difference between memory and imagination, between reality and fantasy, between the objective frame of photography and the subjective realm of experience; with memory itself subject to thoughts and feelings, shifts of emphasis, mis-recognition, repression and forgetting.

In the same way that we embellish memories, Emma has used painting to embellish an archive of photography, to achieve a more intense, experience of her past, replete with the poetry of the unconscious. By grounding the photo-paintings onto reclaimed wood, she embodies these memories, projecting them from the archive and the containment of two dimensions, into the three-dimensional realm of the world and the viewer.

At the same time she opens up the photographic image to the temporal flow of experience, unfolding the frozen moment into the passage of time, so that we, as viewers might become absorbed within the play of paint, time and space within the image itself. In this sense they tell us a lot about both photography and painting. The installation is a bit like a story board of film stills – a life embodied, dispersed through time.

Some things are rendered slightly unreal, or more intense than would have been the case for others. Others are wonky, distorted, rough and ready, like experience and memory itself. We will each navigate our own passage through Emma’s paintings, drawn to hitherto unacknowledged details, forgotten moments, fragile, poetic remembrances, moments of longing, nostalgia, idealism, and others of great intensity, according to our own subjectivity, desires and memories.’


Emma continues to deepen her investigation of such ideas and processes and as a consequence manifest objects that speak of what she is discovering through the unfolding of her journey.