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
