We have visited the American artist Chelsea Mortenson's studio in the area of Montreuil, just at the outskirt of Paris, on May 17th, 2024.

Text archive:
While primarily focusing on painting and printmaking, Chelsea Mortenson examines the contemporary relationships between people and landscape. She explores what we consider beautiful or worth looking at, and what that reveals about us. She is interested in places devastated by disaster, deserts seen as “wasted” and other “empty” space, especially in the global west where this vision of the natural world as a resource to be consumed or to profit by, is tied to colonial, capitalist ideologies.

Recently she has begun to associate geological and meteorological phenomena with architectural motifs that act as witnesses or anchors, giving a sense of human presence and scale. The weather is taking a turn for the worse, rich earth tones are vibrant. It can be disorienting, moving between extremes—in terms of weather, landscape, scale, light... unbelievable. We are going to have to adapt. Perhaps it can also be refreshing, nourishing.

We will be able to see her ongoing paintings in her studio, as well as listen to her talk about her large format printing project that is in the stage of preparation: “Every few years I undertake a large-format printing project. While painting is very greedy will take all of the time I can give it, my printing requires planning and follows a cycle because it's more labor intensive (larger than my press so baren-printed by hand). I’m planning this next print, and at the same time thinking about large formats in painting, which for me are relatively faster and easier. For me it’s more time-intensive to work at a small scale in painting or printing, which is what I’ve been doing primarily these past few years as the new series progresses.”