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 (b. 1985, France) is a transdiciplinary artist living and working between Paris, Arles and Mexico City. The artist graduated from Central Saint Martins with distinction in 2022, received a support grant from the City of Paris for her project #monpremierharcelement (#myfirstharassment) in 2017 and completed a residency at Casa Roga in Mexico City in 2021 and at Les Ateliers de La Madeleine in Arles in 2022.

As an artist-researcher, Vazard investigates the power of personal stories in the construction of our singular, multiple and unstable identities and the need to reclaim our intimate narratives, left out of the Great History. With participatory processes, the artist addresses political issues through personal testimonies.

Her practice is distinguished by a rich diversity of forms and techniques, from participatory performance to embroidered photographs printed on textile, as well as ceramics, sound installations, and plant dyeing... with the photographic medium as the meeting point between the intimate and the universal.

Vazard’s work has been exhibited internationally in New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Montreal, Mexico City, Arles, Brussels and Greece among others. She is a member of several art collectives working on feminist and environmental issues, including Loud Spring and The Ant Project.

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

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Clemence Vazard
🇫🇷 French artist empowering women’s voices
🇬🇧 @boogie_wall
🇧🇪 @thatswhatxsaid
🇺🇸 @loudspringart
🇬🇷 @redd_gallery
👩🏼‍🎓 MA @artsciencecsm
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