About Clementine

Clementine Williams (she/her) is a senior graduating in studio arts with a concentration in Experimental Humanities. Her senior project is an exploration into states of disembodied consciousness, connecting the sensory world of spiders to the act of drawing and to cyberspace. She works mainly with oil paint and graphite, collaging iPhone images with images from her imagination.

How did you decide to come to Bard?

I grew up in Brooklyn. My older sibling went to Bard ten years ago, and then my older brother went to Bard Early College, Queens. Because of that, I actually didn’t want to go to Bard. But I got in. When I got here, I was like, this feels really right. 

I always knew I was going to major in studio arts, and I was also going to major in biology. Through my sophomore year I was on track to major in both. That didn’t end up happening, clearly. Now I’m in Studio Arts with an Experimental Humanities concentration.

How did you become part of the Experimental Humanities department?

I didn’t know what Experimental Humanities was. I would always walk past this crate building by Kline and be really curious. Then I took a 3D animation class with Ben Coonley my sophomore year. It was my first art class that was digital and it’s an Experimental Humanities cross-listed class. It was really awesome. 

Ben told me that I should apply to the media corps. I started working here in the second semester of my junior year, and then I concentrated last fall.

How did your EH concentration impact your senior project?

I knew art was really important to me, but I was also really interested in interdisciplinary research and combining creative elements with more academic elements. I always knew that art and science are very similar. Just in terms of experimenting, the process of creation, and the laboratory and the studio just being sites of questioning. It’s all playing around, coming to certain conclusions, and then starting the cycle all over again.

So that was always really important to me, that kind of cross section and expansion of creativity. When I heard of EH and dropped the bio major, that’s when I was like, okay, this is perfect. How did I not know what EH was this whole time? 

It also impacted the content matter. I was really interested in exploring themes of bodies in cyberspace, and themes of disembodied states of being. I connect that to the state of drawing and then also the state of being online and all of yourself being dispersed across accounts. And kind of recreating and disassembling yourself over and over again in different ways. 

I definitely see that in your work. Your paintings feature a lot of photorealistic bodies that fade into more abstract body symbols, but there’s also a lot of fading into wings and other animal parts. Thinking about experimentation and asking questions, what were you exploring by rooting your paintings in bodies and what you chose to fade them into?

I mean, the figure is super important, and I also don’t really paint faces very much. At least, from the photo references I use, the faces aren’t super important because it’s not portraiture. I’m trying to get at something that’s a bit untethered to reality.

The paintings abide by a kind of dream logic. I’m trying to enter this mental space: this mental void. I try to draw just straight from the imagination, which is very inspired by surrealism and this idea of automatic drawing. It’s kind of just letting your hand go without any plan and seeing what the ink reveals on the paper in front of you. The drawing practice is the foundation of everything I make. There’s a lot of faces and expressions in the drawing actually, more so than the photographic paintings that I do. 

The other part of my practice is the oil paint. And yeah, I think a lot about Donna Haraway and The Cyborg Manifesto. Just her thoughts on our contemporary life being marked by the breaking down of boundaries between human and non human, human and machine, and human and animal. This project is called Slit Sensilla which are the sensory organs on the legs of spiders that pick up on the surface vibrations from their web. The web then becomes kind of an extension of their awareness, an extension of their consciousness and how they kind of map space around them.

So anything that touches the web is kind of like a thought, or an idea, or a feeling that helps them understand the world. Since the web is pulled from outside of their bodies, by building the web they’re building their consciousness. They’re essentially building themselves over and over again.

This kind of reassembling, breaking apart, that’s in motion over time is what I’m really interested in getting at in the work. I actually read about slit sensilla in a piece that I read originally in Krista Caballero’s class Art, Animals & the Anthropocene, which is another Experimental Humanities class. We read it in a work by Ed Yong called An Immense World. Every chapter is about a different animal sense, and it’s so good. It was mind blowing to read.

What was the inspiration for the wings in your work?

So, all the reference imagery for the paintings are from iPhone photos that I’ve taken, or from my imagination. I have this kind of personal archive of images that I take really quickly, or I tell my friend to do some weird thing with their body and I take a photo. 

But those wings, a lot of the wings that are in the show are from these images that I took of pelicans in a park in London. I was watching them for a really long time. They were putting their heads down in the water and turning into different forms. The reflections in the water created an extension of their forms which were meshing together in a really interesting way.

It kind of just emerged in front of me. I was really interested in the images and in seeing what they would do alongside other images I was interested in. And the themes of flight, flocks, movement, and migration occurred a lot in the work.

What is automatic drawing?

Automatism the notion in surrealism that to access subconscious feelings, emotions, and thoughts, you have to sit with a piece of paper and just let the hand draw without any preconceived notion of, what you’re making, without any intentions or goals, and just let the ink guide you, pretty much.

Through that process, unexpected things can happen. It’s a process of experimentation without any destination. And, I think it’s kind of like doodling in a sense. That’s just a different term for it. Just drawing without any conscious thought, without any intention.

You talked about accessing a mental void as part of your process earlier on. How do you feel that head space relates to disembodied headspaces brought on by contemporary life, if at all?

This relates to another reading we have in our class Technology, Humanity, and the Future, The Machine Stops, which is a dystopian short story from 1909 about humans living in this world where nothing is direct experience. Everything is experienced through five degrees of removal and even just communicating with your family members has to be through a screen. And, in the end, they kind of realize that they’ve cut off all of their connections with their bodies and their sensory worlds, which are their ways of feeling directly. So, I think about the last page of that short story a lot and the disembodied consciousness that comes with the act of drawing. 

You can just spend hours drawing, gaining this information from the page, but you’re sort of disconnected from a sensory experience of the world. It’s like the information is coming just from the mind to the page.

It’s connected to the disembodied state that you’re in online. Where information isn’t coming from your ability to taste or touch or smell. It’s coming from this mediated step of just, how do you even describe it? Cyberspace. It’s not a direct sensory experience, but it’s sort of this other thing and that’s kind of what I’m trying to describe visually.

What plans do you have post graduation?

Well, over the summer, I’m going to be living with my friend and turning our living room into a studio. So, that’s going to be awesome. I work at an art gallery in Kingston as well, so I’m going to keep doing that. 

But long term, I’m interested in immersing myself in DIY zine culture and the underground comics scene. Just because comics have been really important to me my whole life. Especially in this body of work too, I think I returned to my childhood fascination with them. It’s just a really different way of viewing and experiencing art, but also a different community, which I’m really attracted to.

What would you say to people thinking about joining EH?

Definitely join EH. Tell your friends about it, spread the word. Join. It’s just an amazing opportunity. In every single class I’ve taken in EH the readings and the syllabus are fascinating. I want to ask you guys for the syllabi so I can keep reading after I graduate. And, it really changes your Bard experience just to be connected to people who are interested in crossing over their interests. It’s also been such an amazing opportunity to meet students that are outside of Studio Arts and also interested in what I’m interested in.