Biography
Clara Luiselli’s work springs form the relationship she establishes with apparently insignificant everydayness. Hidden corners, cracks, memories and identities that the artist takes into her cure and then transforms, preserves, protects, returns in new forms and reveals. This caring requires time, meticulousness and dedication; thus the creative process becomes something of a dynamic meditative process that cannot be separated from the physical effort.
It goes through the ritual of the artist’s actually, physically making each detail with her own hands. The work of these hands has to be visible and yet, at the same time it must blend into what surrounds it, as if it were camouflaged.
Through taking care, as a spiritual exercise, she creates a refuge against wear, sets up protections which, however, do not hinder the transformation of the object allowing it to exist in a new life and take on a new role. Taking care of what is fragile, sacred, of what is no longer but still lives in the memory…of details.
All this demands sensitive and painstaking research into what is not clearly evident. It means a preliminary discovery by the artist, then a mutation so strong that it renders the detail inevitable to the viewer’s gaze, so incisive as to make him want to engage all his senses, not just his eyes.
The reflections that constantly come to the surface in Luiselli’s works revolve around themes of precariousness, mutation, the fragility of existence, the need to preserve it and-at the same time- around the power of essence that is often imprisoned and stays that way, out of fear.
The artwork must be experience in order to be known: the viewer is not asked to contemplate it, but to live it, to become a co-protagonist in its mutation.
The artist does not have a preference for any particular medium because she believes that each message she intends to express has its own “optimum form” that makes it simple and direct. The piece comes into being on the basis of the place, and changes to fit in better, or on the basis of the person around whom it is constructed, or also on the basis of who participates in and uses it.
