Born and raised in San Francisco, artist Danielle Mourning completed her education at Wheaton College, MA, the Art Center College of Design in LA, and London’s Royal College of Art where she received her MFA. Mourning was awarded the Deutsche Bank Award upon graduation. Currently based in San Francisco, Mourning has used her work in multimedia as a medium to look at our interior world and question how we are able to do this in an outwardly obsessed culture.
Mourning began her career as a self-portrait photographer interested in the spiritual ties with her ancestors' and their physical environment. Her obsession with history lingering within the present and specifically with her female lineage culminated most recently in her project entitled Stay with Me. Over the course of two years Mourning created an ambitious living and experiential installation within her home. In 2021, the artist invited viewers for private tours to walk through each of the seven rooms meticulously constructed as an homage to healing her female ancestry, the relationship with her mother's addiction and her bodies' process of dealing with stored trauma. We are proud to offer two of the large-scale pieces created over the course of three years.
Mourning’s intimate photographic work seamlessly melds vintage aesthetic with modern sensibilities and technique as a means to confront themes of ancestry, identity, and question the roles placed on women. She creates self-portraits which echo her familial history superimposed upon the present to forge an ethereal and haunting layer that challenges the passage of time and a shifting inheritance from our female ancestors. Standing in front of Mourning's work confronts the viewer with the fleeting yet sustaining importance of beauty. Within these moments we meet the hunger to return to our higher selves. The part of us that may has hardened and hidden within comes alive with this work which imposes reverence. This work is the art of inwardness; or a pedagogy of interiority which Mourning believes the soul hungers for.
She gives structure to the ennobling resurrection from the human condition of suffering. The passages of darkness are intertwined with immense beauty when touching on the encounter with our soul. This is the secret within our outer story. Mourning looks at the Soul's long and twisted relationship with self and our outer landscape. These contours, grooves and beautiful lines of light become the glimpses of awakening or the portal to awakening which is Mournings' own