ABOUT

Cornelia Pierce is a Vienna-born visual artist based in Los Angeles. Working across photography, moving image, and mixed-media practice, she investigates the shifting boundaries between landscape, perception, and the body. The desert appears as a recurring thread, an environment that shapes much of her recent work without defining its full scope.

Her work often arises from encounters with the natural world, plants, bones, stones, and twilight atmospheres, that later shift into interior, symbolic landscapes. Through acts of layering, abrasion, and material intervention, she explores how memory is inscribed in matter and how mythic sensibilities emerge from the environments she moves through.

Her debut book, Nachtmeer (Nearest Truth Editions, 2024), extends this inquiry into a nocturnal sequence of images accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Troy Pierce. The project traces desert twilight as a threshold between exterior and interior space, where forms dissolve into ambiguity and psychological depth.

In parallel, Pierce’s mixed-media and process-based works investigate the photograph as a mutable surface, part drawing, part sediment, part gesture, where materials and traces gather, dissolve, and reconfigure.

Pierce has lived, studied, and worked in Vienna, London, Berlin, Arizona, and Los Angeles, each place leaving its imprint on the perspectives and materials that inform her work.

For all inquiries: contact@corneliapierce.com