Shifting mood

Artist Susanne Wellm works with photography as her primary medium. Since the 1990s she has explored a wide array of photographic techniques, both analogue and digital, often artistically utilized in a merged form. Exploring the physical qualities of the two-dimensional image, she recently developed a method combining photography and weaving, adding complex, tactile layers of colour, contrast and depth to the expression of the pieces.

An omnipresent vein running through Wellm’s practice is her interest in time, memory and the construction of narrative. With a starting point of a vast archive of found imagery from old family albums, historical movie stills and original captures, Wellm draws connecting lines between the personal dramas of everyday life and the collective history and trauma of modern Europe. Through the use of collage and montage, she pieces together well-known, and often humble, sections of reality, into multi-layered, poetic pictorial spaces, wherein fiction and fact, stagnation and movement, the internal and the external melts together into acutely meaningful moments, cinematically mapping out an action, but all the while remaining open to interpretation.