M. E. Klesse

M. E. Klesse works across painting, sculpture, fiber, sound, and scent, creating multisensory installations that explore grief, memory, resilience, and the body’s relationship to landscape. Born into a family where creativity spanned generations—a mother who painted and made music, a grandfather who was an architect, a great-grandmother who painted in oils—Klesse grew up immersed in making. Early experiences, like helping to build a cabin by hand, revealed how raw materials and co-creation could become lived poetics.

Formally trained in the arts, Klesse developed an interdisciplinary approach that merges intuition with clarity. Education opened the door to broader theoretical currents and underscored critique as a generative tool. This grounding shaped their distinctive method of layering sound, texture, and form into what they call “multisensorial clusters.”

Recurring motifs—filamented trees, spectral figures, architectural fragments—suggest fragility and persistence. They embody liminal states: things dissolving, transforming, or surviving. Influences such as Hilma af Klint, Phyllida Barlow, and Robert Rauschenberg reinforced Klesse’s embrace of ambiguity and their conviction that materials carry memory as much as meaning.

Klesse’s process is rooted in rhythm: short morning jogs that serve as meditation, followed by tactile studio work—pouring, scraping, melting, embedding. Much of the material comes from the Texas Gulf Coast, where storm remnants, industrial debris, and natural fibers become both medium and metaphor. Their encaustic and fiber works often emerge directly from these environments, translating the aftermath of ecological and social fractures into forms that hold grief and resilience together.

For Klesse, success is alignment: when internal questions and external practice move in dialogue. Their aim is not resolution but resonance—to create spaces where grief, survival, and ambiguity coexist, and where viewers feel something before they understand it.

Upcoming projects include a multisensory solo exhibition at The Coast Modern Gallery, Rockport (November 2025), featuring clusters that engage all five senses, and new work for a group exhibition with Artist Talk Magazine, Tribeca, New York (May 2026). Both shows extend Klesse’s ongoing exploration of material, memory, and sensory perception in expanded form.