Clee Ferris discusses their creative process, art making, and experience as an MFA@CIIS student.
Please introduce yourself:
My name is Clee Ferris (she/they). I am a multidisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR. I paint, create sculptures, and explore alternative photographic processes such as cyanotype and scanner as camera. Working with new materials provides a stimulating opportunity for creative problem solving. Art has always been a part of my life. Growing up, my mom was an interior designer and I lived inside of her compositions .My grandma was an artist and always generously shared her art supplies with me and encouraged my creativity. While earning a BFA in Studio Art, my professors had contemporary ideals around curious exploration rather than rigid and outdated artistic rules. This helped me experiment without external impositions of right and wrong.
What ideas do you explore in your art making process?
At the heart of my work is creative problem solving and using visual language to convey ideas without words. Think of experiences that are indescribable and inexplicable, such as dreams or memories and how they are felt in our bodies yet challenging to describe. I’m interested in prioritizing visual language as a means of expression, using color, movement, form, and texture to tell a story, and elicit sensation in the viewer. When I work, I am in a flow state where I tap into my subconscious and thus into the collective consciousness. I allow the process and materials to lead me through a curious child-like exploration. After some time, I return to refine the composition visually.
Can you share about your experience as an MFA student at CIIS?
The interdisciplinary nature of the MFA@CIIS program is filled with innovative thinkers using a variety of ways to express themselves. Learning to talk about art and the creative process in an expansive way to include various media has further fostered openness in my art study. For example, during the program I decided to work in sculpture and the interdisciplinary nature of the program encouraged that. Through the Creative Inquiry course taught by Cindy Shearer, I stretched my mind to apply skills in new ways and shifted my thinking out of old ruts.
What are you currently working on?
During the pandemic I started obsessively taking “selfies” on my scanner at home. It was an attempt to see myself : my identity (gender, queerness). Growing up I loved Polaroids. They were thrilling in the era of film cameras, because you didn’t have to wait to see the images. There was something about the immediacy and the unpredictability. In this age of smartphones, selfies are perfectly edited and filtered creating highly curated images. Some of the images don’t look like the individual at all in the end.I was interested in who I really am. There’s a lack of control with this (scanner as camera) method. You don’t really know what you will see of yourself when the image arises on the screen.
I have been following this thread for quite some time and asking myself, what am I doing here, what is this about? I realized with my final MFA project the scans were a component to the exploration. I integrated the scans into 2 paintings, and also recreated two of the scans by painting versions of them. I made sculptures, and integrated the pieces I had removed from the paintings. Internally through this process I was attempting to see myself, my fragmentation and reinhabit a new form of my own construction. Many people face similar transitions right now in our culture. While we all reel from the effects of the pandemic, climate change and the current political climate, we want to know who we are and see ourselves clearly.
Clee curiously explores a variety of media, utilizing an abstract and surreal visual language to speak with color, organic forms, and movement. She received a BFA in Studio Art from SOU, as well as an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from CIIS.
Follow Clee on instragram @cleewren and at www.cleewren.com
