To date, I’ve produced several staged works of experimental theatre which by and by led me into visual arts and performance where one can be freer in what I call my ongoing research, as my artistic practice is to constantly find new paths.
When I’ve engaged in participatory works, I often work with questions and answers like when I collected stories from friends and family, making them part of my texts/art - for example my exhibition ”The things we never said” I posed that very question to individuals - what they wished they had told someone, but didn't. Their answers were written on objects and became a sound installation along with drawings.
Clara Diesen
Object Theatre
November 3rd - February 6th, 2021
I am a poet and director of theatre who is combining writing with visual art. The use of different genres has always been part of my work. I parallel writing with arts and working with theatre was always about using the stage as a tool for living poetry.
I produced drawings and films I call ”object theatre” as a continuation of staged work, drawings with objects in relationships to each other and animations with teacups with dramatic destinies.
I became forever fascinated by objects and their meaning, it is we who charge them with memory and so I have been a collector all my life. Stones, shells, tickets, scents, branches, cups. It is a dead object when we find it, and then we charge them with meaning the moment we decide to use it as a vessel for memory – it becomes a material memory.
I also work with ”readymades'' - modified objects because it is a way of exploring what already is, as I am immensely influenced by zen Buddhism. I also have a thematic obsession with memory and loss, from the personal experience of losing my mother when I was young.
The opportunity to display these works on a gallery wall further informs the debate of art vs. craft and helps to push against the cultural, social, gender, and economic assumptions in relation to the value and definition of fine art.
