Clara Emery (b. 1997; Seattle, WA) makes large format photographs and experimental short films that explore phenomena haunting the edges of memory and reality. Through researching folklore, ritual, superstition, and collecting accounts of uncanny experiences, Emery constructs scenes from different narratives and traditions. She graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2019 with a degree in Photography, and is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Fish March in a Protective Circle, Clockwise, 2022, archival pigment print, 40x50"
Film stills from A House of Dream-Memory, 2023, digital video, 8:23 mins
Shan Hai Zhen Xing Tang (山海鎮刑堂), 2021, archival pigment print, 40x50"
One of my early childhood memories is of coming across a small and raucous temple procession in the streets of Taipei. However, my engagement with local Taoist traditions at this time did not extend beyond customary holiday worship and spectatorship, in part due to the stigma surrounding local Taoist communities. As an adult, I came to live in an area of Taiwan with a large number of temples and temple regiments (zhèntóu). Thus, I became deeply interested and involved in the temple community. I am enthralled by the tales I have encountered in local traditions and oral histories of the many places I have lived, and enchanted by the blurred boundary between history and myth.
How can psychological experiences and uncanny events be described visually? How is spiritual protection practiced in different communities? To answer these questions, I look at tales and traditions of communities familiar to me. I have inherited tales from the Gila wilderness through ancestry, and adopted traditions from the Pacific Northwest and Taiwan through childhood experience. Through ethnographic research and the contextualization of personal experience within this research, I investigate how superstitions from these different mountainous regions relate to each other. Nestled in constructed domestic space, my films and photographs exist alongside sculptures which use elements from the same traditions.
In 2022, I made a trip to New Mexico, a place that holds memories of many generations of my family. In pursuit of memory and sacred space, I reconstructed experiences and memories as told in stories from my great grandparents. Other photographs are inspired by excerpts from the dream journal I keep, and some photographs document Taiwanese temple regiment members in various states between their personal identities and ritual identities. Following my trip to New Mexico, I began to work with dirt from the many mountainous places to which I am attached; Washington State, Taiwan, and New Mexico. I use dirt from these places in films, photographs, and sculptures to construct physical points of spiritual power and sacred space.
Gods, Landscape, and Memory: Investigating Sites From Taiwanese Taoist Lore is a project I have proposed which brings together my interests in superstition and site-specific memory. This project will document locations tied to local religious lore; these include places mentioned in origin stories of Taoist gods and tales of miracles they have wrought. I will carry out this project in Taiwan over the next year, investigating ways in which sites regarded as having intense spiritual power have shaped local communities. Sites of car accidents, suicides, and other traumatic events occupy lesser spiritual space in Taiwan. Priests and temple regiments (zhèntóu) are often sent to these locations to rid the space of spirits that have collected there. As I have encountered these different spaces, I have recognized that it is essential not only to document the places to which these narratives are tied, but also the people who undertake the spiritual management of these places.