Fantasy plays a large role in my practice with photography being a magical process and medium with capturing light, lenses bringing things into focus that may have gone unnoticed, and its ability to transform the mundane and ordinary into otherworldly. Erotica is in its nature a fantasy unfolded before our eyes and is important in not only escapism but a way of processing one’s own desires and confronting forbidden ideas. The use of erotica in the work is to use as a vehicle to apply pressure to taboo topics that are frequently part of current conservative social structures such as how bodies, sex, gender, and sexuality are controlled and regarded in the day today. With often employing painting techniques in using photographs as the paint with the adding and reductive qualities of building layers in composing the photographic imagery.

The processes in collage, mixed media and photomontage have a violent nature, the use of cutting, tearing, and erasing parts of the imagery which reinforces in my practice how often times conservative social structures abuse, manipulate, and destroy those who live outside of certain viewpoints in the world. The use of analog tropes in photography and collage such as grain, multiple exposures, light leaks, leaving various evidence of tape, paint, and other materials on the image and having a viewer perhaps question in determining where digital manipulation starts and analog begins in the pieces. These methods speak to photography’s enticingly deceptive fantasy of reality that has since its creation presented for our consumption various messages, contexts, and content to be used as re-affirming truths. However now in the digital age of facetune and Adobe Suites, we have found ourselves gazing at a new foundation for challenging preconceived notions of photography which can create an unreliable narrator as a more compelling witness. The title, On My Knees, comes from a lyric in Madonna’s lead single from her fourth studio albums, Like A Prayer, which incorporates both sexual innuendo and religious traditions of positioning one’s body in prayer. On My Knees is a build-up and removal of various layers of a repetitive pose found in erotica also harkening to angels and cherubs and a subservient being ready to worship and serve a “master”. The interior space surrounding the kneeling figure is that of a domestic living room-like space for which a femme body is often told is their place to reside/be imprisoned. Using various bodies to construct a new body, unworldly form, but also seemingly a composite of the same person moving into a position of worship. Using elements such as hair to also build a wing coming from the back of the figure is to give an element of fantasy, the angel. Ideas of a sinner needing to be forgiven, the on-going nature of erotica being disapproved, and the naked femme form being one of shame now placed in a context of religion and angelic qualities to clash between jezebel and saint, a burden femme bodies often carry in life.

© Autumn Elizabeth Clark, Morning, 2020

Would you be able to expand upon your process for creating images? 

It is very explorative in many ways, very mood driven, at times I feel like I have just made my own jigsaw puzzle and I have never seen the cover depicting the final image. Lately, it has been that I am focusing on a thought and then I create a set of guidelines for the creation of each piece. It is somewhat like cooking for me, I have the ingredient I want to highlight and then from there it’s determining what flavors and cooking method I want to apply to the main ingredient. Silly, I know!

Do you have a set plan when making the pieces, or do you employ a more intuitive approach to them? When do you decide to finish a piece? 

I do both methods, I think that blindly making something can be revealing and opens yourself up to discovery. There are times I will be working on a collage that I am focusing on and then the scraps that I have left aside, I begin building off of as well, but try to make more subconscious gestures versus more contemplated gestures. The piece is either complete if I finished a set of rules or intuition based. 

Do you have any significant influences in your art practice?  Be it family, fellow artists, or meaningful life experiences?

I’d have to say lately it’s been meeting people with body dysmorphia, struggling with eating disorders and self image which I can relate to as growing up the weight you were was always spoken about constantly and I find it is very prevalent in many people’s lives. I think being comfortable in your skin is imperative to finding your own beauty alongside not listening to social constructs of beauty which are non stop being force fed to us through photography and film through movies, social media, reality tv and in the beauty industry with corset just now being called spanx and diets that continue to suppress people from focusing on loving themselves.

When not making artwork, what do you enjoy most to do in your free time?

What is next for you, Autumn? How are you handling the pandemic while simultaneously continuing to create?

Just moved back to Chicago after being on the east coast for two years, started a short ghost story inspired by a new apartment and working odd jobs while I am able during this time. I’d like to think I have been able to handle the pandemic pretty well, I was homeschooled from first grade till I graduated high school, so being at home is very nostalgic in a way for me.