Charlotte Aeb: “I Need to Make in Order to Think”

From photography to wax and clay, Charlotte Aeb keeps reinventing the image.

Charlotte Aeb never stopped looking, she just changed the lens. Born in Fribourg in 1992, she trained in photography at CEPV in Vevey. Then she left. Eight months on the road, through Hong Kong, Hanoi, and Sydney, showing her work in small galleries along the way. Since returning, Charlotte Aeb has pushed her practice further. She moved from film to video, then to wax, clay, and everyday objects. The image, for her, was never meant to stay flat, and photography was only ever a starting point.

Her latest series, She No Longer Remembers Her Face, repeats one self-portrait until it dissolves. It asks a simple question: how much of us stays fixed, and how much keeps changing? For Charlotte Aeb, art should never need a manual. Anyone should be able to step in, whatever their background. That belief runs through everything she makes, and it shapes how she talks, too, about failure, accident, and the parts of her work she never fully controls.

IRK: If someone asked you what kind of artist you are, what would you actually say?

I am an artist with a background in photography, although my practice has gradually evolved towards visual art.

Charlotte Aeb: I create works that can be approached without instructions. They should communicate immediately through their presence, materiality, or form, while leaving room for deeper engagement for those who wish to explore further.

For me, making art is a political act. Not because every work delivers a specific message, but because I reject the idea that only those with the “right” cultural codes can access art. I want anyone to be able to connect with my work through their own perspective, experiences, and sensibility.

My practice is rooted in experimentation. Several projects often develop side by side. I test, I fail, I begin again. Rather than wait months for the perfect idea, I’d always choose to make something imperfect. Making, for me, is how I think.

IRK: Was there a specific image, place, or person that first made you want to make things rather than just look at them?

Charlotte Aeb: It’s impossible for me to name just one thing. If I had to answer in order, I’d say: a staircase near the “Pierrefleur” bus stop , an exhibition at the 2008 Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, the Indignados movement, the humidity of Hong Kong, the work of Pipilotti Rist, London’s Barbican, a puddle I saw the other day that looked like a five-legged animal, and countless other things.

It’s this accumulation of encounters, places, sensations, memories, and very ordinary details that first made me want to create, and that continues to inspire and motivate me every day.

IRK: What made you want to turn a photograph into something you could actually touch and shape?

Charlotte Aeb: The desire to move beyond traditional photography has been part of my practice for a long time, although it took me years to find the right form for it. In the past, I experimented with analogue photography by cutting images apart and layering them, then with video, and more recently with materials such as clay, wax, and everyday objects.

What interests me is not abandoning photography, but reinterpreting it, seeing what happens when I push it beyond its usual boundaries.

I also think it comes from the fact that I’ve always enjoyed working with volume and physical space.

Turning a two-dimensional photograph into an object that can be touched and experienced in space began as a simple curiosity. I wanted to see what that translation would produce, not only for the image itself, but also for the way we look at it.

IRK: Do you remember the first photo you took that actually felt like yours, something that felt like it came from you rather than just a good picture?

Charlotte Aeb: This is an analogue photograph of a staircase that I took when I was 12 years old. That moment left a clear feeling in me, one I still remember well. Developing the photograph made it even stronger. A sense of capturing something truly unique stayed with me. It was a feeling that belonged only to me, something that existed in my mind. Suddenly, it took shape on this piece of photographic paper.

IRK: Your recent series repeats the same self-portrait until it fragments and disappears. At what point in that process do you stop recognizing yourself ?

Charlotte Aeb: This work is one of the most personal projects I have created, and I think that the difficulty I have in talking about it is also one of the reasons why it exists.

I have often felt that society pushes us to adopt certain roles. It pushes us to fit into categories, and to become a version of ourselves that others understand more easily. She No Longer Remembers Her Face emerged from this feeling. It carries the uncertainty of not always knowing how to be, how to act, or even who we truly are.

The project explores the space between what we show to others and what exists more deeply within ourselves. Are we the image we construct of ourselves, or are we a more fluid presence, constantly evolving?

At first, I was convinced that I would use my own face simply because it was the most accessible form. I could distort it as much as I wanted, whereas I would never have allowed myself to put someone else’s face through this process.

But gradually, I understood that this choice was not only practical. If I was working with my own self-portrait, it was because this question already existed within me.

Through repetition, fragmentation, and the gradual disappearance of the face, I wanted to explore an identity that never fully settles. The face becomes a material, almost like a sculpture, that I can transform, cover, erase, and then bring back in another form.

It becomes a fragile trace of what keeps changing, suspended between presence and disappearance, between what belongs to us and what escapes us. This work is a way of inhabiting this uncertainty, of accepting that our identity never fully settles, but keeps becoming.

IRK: How much of what you make do you decide in advance, and how much happens by accident while you work?

Charlotte Aeb: I had a result in mind, but this project involved a great deal of experimentation. This is what mainly allowed me to move forward: being in the laboratory, testing, observing the results. I also had to accept that I would not always know in advance what would work.

Some experiments took much longer than others. For example, the wax printing process, which is the last piece I created, required a great deal of research and adjustment. Wax is a very unpredictable surface: it deforms, it shifts, and the photographic emulsion did not always adhere in the way I wanted it to. A large part of the process was therefore about learning from these limitations.

Because these techniques are experimental, there is inevitably a certain element of accident and unpredictability. What I find interesting is this: repeating a gesture sometimes makes the result more technically controlled. But it also loses something more spontaneous. There were times when I created five or ten versions of the same piece. Despite this, it was often the very first one that expressed what I was truly looking for. That version was usually the rawest and least controlled.

IRK: What question about your work do you wish people asked you more often?

Charlotte Aeb: The question I would perhaps like to be asked more often is: “Do you make a living from your work?”

I do make a living from photography, but not from my artistic practice. I feel that many people still judge and devalue commercial photography, or any field that doesn’t directly connect to an artistic approach.

However, it is extremely difficult today to live solely from one’s art. I believe we need to normalize the fact that an artist can have multiple facets within their practice. Working in commercial photography, even when it is not artistic, also makes it possible to build stability. It lets me pay rent and continue developing personal projects.

For me, these different activities are not in opposition to one another. They are part of the contemporary reality of many artists and are precisely what allows us to continue creating with greater freedom.

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