The following three works were created in the years 2022-2024 and are to be understood as a self-contained group of works; as they complement, add and relate to each other.
I went back and saw I was already gone
"Alle Räume" is an inprint on paper, first shown at the exhibition "Drawn" at SittArt Gallery in 2023.
The inprint shows the floor plan of the church where the artist lived as a child, drawn from her head. During her in-depth study of the building and the community in which she grew up, she realised that the spaces of her childhood, especially in terms of objects and furniture, were intermingled. The different interiors that the flat and the church she lived in had undergone over the years merged in her mind into a new flat and a new church.
Due to her preoccupation with the church bell (see 24//SOUND) and the associated plan to visit the building again for the first time a decade after her leaving, the artist made a sketch of the floor plan in her head. Originally intended as a dyptich, she ultimately decided against making the planned second sketch of the real, current floor plan after realizing that the places of her childhood no longer existed, making the dyptich superfluous.
She then decided to not show the actual sketch, but the paper under it, minimizing and reducing the sketch while leaving the viewer with nothing more than the inprint of the ballpen on paper. The whole inprint can just be seen with the right angle of light and when the viewer gets very close to the paper, alluding to the loss, uncertainness and fluidity of memory.
to hear the marrow of ones bone
the sound shown here is a loop of the church bell from the church where the artist grew up, but it is not the actual ringing of the bell that can be heard, but the sound that the bell makes before it starts ringing.
this specific sound is caused by the vibration of the bell and the mechanics, which is transmitted to the architecture of the building, creating a muffled, mechanical sound that could only be heard by the artist's family, who in their role as sextons lived in a flat next to the bell tower. The artist found it fascinating how the building and family life were interwoven. Most buildings are designed for their people, but here a family lived for the building. The sound of the bell dominated and structured the daily routine, when the family got up and when they went to bed, when they ate and when it was time for church service.
The work deals with the ambivalent and special emotional relationship that the artist associates with the sound of the bell, which on the one hand is connected with many positive memories from her childhood, but on the other hand also with many negative memories of her departure from the community and the associated deconstruction.
The act of sharing this intimate sound can thus be seen as an act of liberation to the artist. Due to the unavoidability of hearing the sound as a child and the emotions that came with that it is now a crucial part of the work that she remains in control over the sound at any time, being able to chose if she want's to share this intimate work with the viewer or not.
therefore, to keep true to the concept of the work, the visitors of the website have to directly request the sound at the artist.
In my memory everything was so tall, now that I'm grown it seems like a puppet house
"Puppet house" is a miniature model of the church bell tower that was next to the artist childhood-room.
The towers appearance is abstracted, ripping down a crucial part of an sacred place to it's core, minimizing it to it's bare function, while eliminating the one thing it is build for – the church bell. Ripped from its purpose, we're left with the shadows. What used to be wooden beams, steel girders and masonry is now made entirely of paper, resuming and extending the visual language that the artist already used for her previous work " Alle Räume". Not only that, the paper used here also came from the building, alluding to relics as well as souvenirs.
to the artist, the bell tower represents and compromises the twisted relationship she has with growing up inside of an sacred place. Placed prominently next to the artists former apartment, the tower was her playground – a place of mystery and wonder. What seemed huge and sometimes a little frightening to her now, as an adult, seemed small and cramped. What had previously been emotionally and spiritually charged now feels empty, like a shell of its former self.
The transformation of the bell tower into a fragile paper model symbolizes not just the loss of its original purpose but also the artist's own journey of confronting and reinterpreting the memories of her past. Through this work, she invites us to reflect on how time alters our perception of the sacred and the familiar, leaving us to question what remains when the essence is stripped away.
