Clemence Vazard

"I give a voice to women to rebalance our society."

Clemence Vazard is an interdisciplinary artist.
She transforms intimate stories into powerful manifestos.

An international visibility

Clémence Vazard is a Paris based artist whose interdisciplinary artistic practice explores gendered violence and female representation. From performance to video, through photography, collage and sound, Clémence Vazard appropriates each plastic language to transform intimate narratives into visual manifestos.

The artist is currently doing a MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins and previously graduated with a Master in Arts and Culture Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris in 2009. Clémence Vazard exhibited her work in international art festivals such as Chromatic Festival in Montreal and Passion for Freedom Festival in London and had several solo and group shows in London (Boogie Wall Gallery, M&C Saatchi, Make Space Euston Town), Paris (Galerie 21, Galerie Diese22, Galerie Mémoire de l'Avenir, FGO Barbara, Le Carreau du Temple, Mairie du 7eme...), Avignon (City Hall), Mexico (Galeria ZClub) and the United States (Central Features Gallery, Greenpoint Gallery).

Clémence Vazard artistic work is part of the feminist art movement. Feminist art reintroduce the articulation of socially relevant issues within a fine art idiom, while adopting new mediums to experience greater freedom and develop singular artistic languages. As a frenetic reader Clémence Vazard leads her researches on the power of stories in the construction of our singular, multiple and unstable identities and the need to reclaim our own narratives. The artist draws her inspiration both from her own experiences and from the intimate stories of the women she gives voice to. Vazard works address political issues with intimate narratives.

Clémence Vazard is a thought leader in art and feminism, the artist is regularly invited to give talks or museum lectures about women artists and feminist movements. She recently joined Loud Spring international Art Tank as an associate artist. Clémence Vazard is represented by Boogie Wall Gallery in London.

Vision

"I believe in the power of intimate stories to change History. What I want as an artist is to create inspiring artworks for women to speak up their true-self."
Clemence Vazard designs her artworks as platforms to claim her commitments and invite all women to reclaim their stories. Her participative projects are powerful tools to express the singularity of each woman and fight against stereotypes in the process.
From women representation to sexual harassment issues, Clémence Vazard creates artwork with strong emotional potential for us to unlock our truth.

Inspirations

Clemence Vazard belongs to a lineage of artists who advocate, as Isabelle Alfonsi calls it, an "aesthetics of emancipation"*, relating aesthetics to politics, opposing the reproduction of social domination in the ideological systems of art. The artistic lineage in which she is engaged has its source in the women painters of the renaissance, extends the echo of the “Radical” Latin American Women artists of the last part of the 20th Century and responds by recontextualizing them into the works of feminist artists of the 1970s.

From Artemisia Gentileschi, who expressed through her paintings her experiences of rape and harassment by reappropriating biblical scenes, to Ana Mendietta who set out to explore the notion of the body as political field, and Claude Cahun, whose work on the borderline of photography, collage and performance, takes the body as a material for reflection on representations to propose multiple, non-fixed identities... Clemence Vazard's work is constantly inspired by women and queer artists who address political issues by providing new artistic languages.

Barbara Kruger's collages gathering female portraits and statement texts ("Your body is a battleground", for example) is a strong reference in Clemence Vazard's use of words in her artwork, which she has revisited through sound art. Obviously, Judy Chicago's installation "The Dinner Party" is a constant reference for her research on female history, the power of the narratives and the construction of a "HerStory".

*Isabelle Alfonsi, Pour une esthétique de l'émancipation, B42 Paris ,2019