Here’s an exhibition for the existentially troubled: Swiss artist Karin Lehmann created an homage to decay this year with Sediment Sampling. The exhibition used 200 unfired clay pots on the floor of the Förderverein für aktuelle Kunst in Münster. The pots were filled with water and allowed to crack and fall apart into a puddle of formless clay.
Above image: Karin Lehmann, Sediment Sampling, 2014
Looking at these pictures, I found myself thinking about the hundreds of artworks that I see each month, more specifically where those works end up after their exhibitions close. They can’t all be sold. What happens to them? And it’s not just the pieces themselves! What happens to the time it took to create the piece? The effort the artist spent in school? The 1,000-word critical essay accompanying the show? The commentary about the works written by people like myself?
Help.
The reason I’m not hiding under my bed right now is because the decay portion of the piece calms me down a little. I like the idea of Lehmann investing so much time into shaping these vessels only to hand the keys of the exhibition to Chaos for the remaining half of it. Dematerialization, unmanaged by Lehmann, is shaping these works as well and the callous randomness of it still holds beauty and purpose. There’s a photograph in this series of a white vase which (unlike the others which are collapsing into heaps) appears to be sinking directly into the floor. It’s easy to imagine that the whole of that vase still exists within the dirty puddle on the concrete.
Bill Rodgers is a Contributing Editor at CFile.
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Karin Lehmann, Sediment Sampling, 2014
Reminds me of the First Annual Open Invitational Unfired Clay Exhibition: ’70.
very beautiful. congratulations.
This kind of work should puzzle and perplex. It takes ceramic beyond our traditional understanding of the material and its purpose.
Meaning here is embedded in the process as much as in the physical offering.
And as for value and valuing,they exist in a context removed from the classic ‘fine art in the gallery and auction house’ context.
Congratulations to Karin Lehman for a beautiful and troubling installation, which has echoes of the transient installation ‘SPODE TOWERS’ by Caroline Tattersall at the British Ceramic Biennial 2011 (located at the Spode Works, Stoke-on-Trent, UK), which was very moving.
And many thanks to Bill Rodgers for his thought-provoking comments.
Thank you, Sarah!
– Bill
Really inteligent intuition and simple work.
Sincerely my best wishes!
This is a really nice installation, though I would argue it is actually very painterly in its own way–the vessels melt, dissolve, become their own kind of pigmentation, markmaking. It is a form of figure/ground.