Artist Collaboration / 10
For our 10th Peer/Peer Collaboration, Swiss artist Clemens Wild collaborated with Harriet Body, an artist based in Canberra, Australia. Wild works with the supported studio Atelier Rohling, a supported studio based in Bern.
Clemens Wild
Clemens Wild's drawings range from sketches to comics to political commentary. In addition to paper, he sometimes uses a facade or a lampshade as an image carrier. He often uses them to document his surroundings and tell stories with apt irony. His oeuvre reads as a tribute to labour or a commentary on care work. Wild works with pencil, collage technique, ink and tempera. In 2018 Clemens Wild was awarded the Euward art prize for painting and graphics and in 2022 he became the first artist with special needs in Switzerland to be admitted to the professional association Visarte. Wild is an artist with Atelier Rohling.
Harriet Body
From Berry Springs, NT (Kungarakan country), Harriet Body lives and works in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (Ngunnawal and Ngambri country). Body's art practice is centred around care, slowness, and community. In her studio, she works with media that broadly cross textiles, ceramics, and installation. Her creative process is slow and meditative. Through the repetition of mark-making or form-shaping, her work is all about watching something grow and then end. Her socially engaged practice involves supporting different community groups to explore these concepts of slowness and mark-making as a means of expressing and exerting their power.
Harriet holds an MFA (research), for which she received an Australian Postgraduate Award and a BFA (first class) from the UNSW School of Art and Design. She received major project funding from Create NSW in 2015, 2018, and 2021. She was a finalist in the NSW Emerging Visual Arts Fellowship in 2019 and was awarded the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Prize in 2017.
Zoom meeting for collaboration: Harriet Body, Lisa Slominski, Sophie Brunner, and Clemens Wild (clockwise from top left)
During the first Zoom meeting, Clemens and Harriet shared examples of their artwork. They had in common, an interest in memories, women’s labour and care. From this initial sharing of artworks, the ideas of memories, shared spaces, and community/communal were recorded.
Artwork before the collaboration.
Click on each image below for a larger view and caption details.
Gathering.
In the following Zoom meetings, Clemens and Harriet continued to discuss shared interests. Conceptually this included socially engaged art, ideas of care and community, but documenting the labour of women remained central. They also discussed and noticed in each other’s artworks the use of memories; both invented and documented. Aesthetically, they also had in common a passion for line, and in particular, how as artists, they have different approaches to making lines via drawing and embroidery.
Following Clemens and Harriet looking at some historical textiles and Clemens’ interest in the work of artist Lucienne Hälg, they were inspired to make collaborative works with tablecloths. For them, the idea of tablecloths represented family, history, narrative, and a place for sharing and gathering.
The framework for this collaboration was that each artist would find a tablecloth and contribute to it creatively. The contributions were to be open-ended but also respond to the reoccurring themes of women’s labour, community, and memories. After Clemens and Harriet both completed working on their tablecloths, they shipped them internationally to the other. Once received, each artist then added another layer of creativity to the tablecloths, so that both textiles were completely collaborative at the close of the project. Each of the two tablecloths were embroidered by Harriet and painted and drawn on by Clemens.
These images are of Clemens (left) and Harriet (right) each working in their studio or domestic space on the second phase of the tablecloths.
Paint then stitch. Switzerland to Australia.
For this tablecloth, Clemens said of his choosing a tablecloth to Harriet:
My mother has given me an old nice thick linen tablecloth, which also has traces, but from the sun bleached spots. We used it on the terrace, because a white cloth would glare too hard. I, my mother, my father and probably even my much too early deceased brother have eaten on it.
Clemens painted women at work, often capturing women who work within care industries and roles. The composition includes women engaging in work at desks or with their professional equipment, as well as women coming to and from work. This is especially noticeable in the scene created by Clemens of women at a bus stop.
After Harriet received Clemens's tablecloth in Canberra, Australia, she meticulously adorned Clemens's scenes of women with embroidered florals and botanicals. Of her process, she told Clemens:
I've loved getting to know the women you have painted. I feel their labour. And have decided to contribute an aspect of my own labour as an artist interested in time and process. In my practice, I work with embroidery as a way of extending a line - embroidery forces you to slow down. A stitched line is slow, careful and purposeful. I have brought that into this work by doing this repetitive mark making surrounding the women you have painted. I like to think the repetitive lines look like these invisible auras. Then I've incorporated flowers - inspired by the embroidered tablecloth photos you sent me from a recent museum trip you took. I had this idea of offering these ladies flowers. While also giving a nod to traditional embroidery craft that is seen on tablecloths - made by women - that feature the most beautiful decorative flower designs. I loved your idea of working with medicinal flowers and herbs! Thank you for offering that. There's something lovely about working with flowers that offer some kind of care.
Harriet Body and Clemens Wild, tablecloth #1 for Gathering (2023). pencil, paint and embroidery on fabric.
Click on this image for a larger view and click on each image below for details of tablecloth #1.
Stitch then paint. Australia to Switzerland.
For this tablecloth, Harriet said to Art et al. and Clemens of her starting point:
I thought I could embroider text that tells stories of women in my life who have cared for me, in different ways. So the tablecloth would hold these stories of casual acts of care that have meant a lot to me (some I think the friend in question may not even know how meaningful their act was). And maybe, it's through reading these acts of care that Clemens might get a better understanding of me. Might get to know me better through knowing the actions of others towards me that I found meaningful.
The stories which Harriet embroidered are: Deb danced wildly with me every week for my first year of motherhood; Soph would often rescue me in her old bomb van; Stella gave me a patch of dirt to grow veges; Karla brought me soft, stinky cheeses in hospital; Steph carried both hers and my bags; Alice gave me magic, invisible, monster deterring potion; Jacks made me Sunday dinners after my first break up; Mum built an enclosure for my vegetable garden; Lolly tidied all my cupboards and drawers; and Kate always checks in.
After Clemens received Harriet's tablecloth in Bern, Switzerland, he drew and then painted a selection of women caring. Some of the women composed are Clemens's responses to the women in Harriet’s stories, while others are personal and fictional women. Inspired by the historic textiles shared during the Zoom meetings and his trips to museums, Clemens also leaned into the decorative through the placement and scale of his composed women. Four small women are positioned in the corners, while five more prominent women are featured in the centre of the tablecloth.
Harriet Body and Clemens Wild, tablecloth #2 for Gathering (2023). pencil, paint and embroidery on fabric.
Click on this image for a larger view and click on each image below for details of tablecloth #2.
Reflections.
Art et al. co-founder Lisa Slominski spoke to Clemens, Harriet and Sophie Brunner of Atelier Rohling at the end of the project to hear about their experience of the collaboration.
Interview highlights.
Do you have a favourite part of the tablecloths or process?
Clemens: I usually draw people inside of rooms, and in this tablecloth instead, these women are outside the drawing.
Lisa: So you made the women without a background?
Clemens: Yeah.
Sophie: That is unusual for him because normally he will contextualise them in their working area.
Harriet: It's hard to choose favourites because I love all of the individuals! I love each of the tablecloths that I have been spending so much time on because I've been stitching and I've been giving flowers to each of these women. I feel like I can't choose a favourite, but I suppose a favourite idea was me being able to spend time with each individual woman.
Clemens, you've done such a good job of giving each woman her own character, like some of them are small and some of them are tall and some of their body language is different. And so I really enjoyed getting to know them and they're all doing something different. Yeah, I love them. I think my favourite part was really getting to know them because I could really actually spend so much time with each individual.
How has this collaboration impacted your art practice?
Sophie: [Clemens] is now doing another co-working project at Atelier Rohling. They are working together. He started today. We met an artist and they're working on the same picture…He got inspired by this co-working together and he proposed it to this artist to work on a picture together.
Clemens: I am also taking tablecloths and pulling them over a frame. [working in a new way, on fabric, following this collaboration]
Harriet: I've really enjoyed working in a more decorative way. And being able to collaborate has given me permission to, kind of, look at flowers and Clemens, you kept talking about these tablecloths that you have seen in exhibitions and you sent pictures that they were all very kind of decorative and floral. I think that's kind of opened up my mind to experimenting with a more decorative space in my practice as well…
I collaborate a lot with different sorts of community groups and so having this collaboration with another artist (I have collaborated with artists before but often I collaborate with people who don't identify as artists), I think I'd like to explore collaborating more with other artists and see how that works within my the work that I do as a socially engaged artist.