Exhibition | Marie T. Hermann: “And dusk turned dawn, Blackthorn” at Simone DeSousa Gallery, Detroit

Currently residing and working in Detroit, Marie Torbensdatter Hermann was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. She moved to London in 2000, where she received her BA in Art from the University of Westminster in 2003. She was the studio manager for British artist Edmund de Waal from 2003 to 2007. She then studied at the Royal College of Art, London and received her MFA in 2009.  She currently lives in Bloomfield Hills.

Above image: Marie T. Hermann, And dusk turned dawn #T, stoneware, 17 3/4 x 7 1/4 x 6 1/2 inches

Her current exhibition, And dusk turned dawn, Blackthorn, is showing at the Simone DeSousa Gallery in Detroit from May 2 – June 20, 2015.

From the Gallery:

In And dusk turned dawn, Blackthorn, Marie T. Hermann presents a group of twelve new still life scenes from the everyday life. Shown in a room of William Morris wallpaper covered walls, the modernist language of the pieces, destitute of all decoration and patterns, contrasts with the immediately recognizable Arts and Crafts floral pattern.

Hermann grew up in Denmark in an environment heavily influenced by the heritage of Danish Modernism, and then studied in England. Finding that she was equally interested in the Arts and Crafts movement and the language of modernism, Hermann has explored the juxtaposition of these contrasting areas of art history inciting an unexpected dialog to emerge.

In And dusk turned dawn, Blackthorn, these two seemingly contradicting visual worlds are brought together seamlessly, insinuating connections between form and pattern, history and shapes, as Hermann would suggest captured “in objects that travel around with us, frozen in one moment in time before they move on, as we move on.”

Writing for HyperAllergic, Sarah Rose Sharp delved into Hermann’s processes and inspirations as the artist held a discussion at the gallery with Museum of Arts and Design director Glenn Adamson. We suggest you read the full piece here. Sharp states:

The conversation initially focused on the show’s name, which reflects Hermann’s love of evocative and slightly mysterious titles, ones that have a “hint of something beautiful, but also have a hint of melancholia.” Hermann used this body of work to explore her interest in a moment in time when things change, ruminating on the quality of light during the transitional moments of dusk and dawn that effectively drain a room of color and depth, reducing dimensional objects to flat line drawings.

The eponymous “Blackthorn” is the name of the William Morris wallpaper which lines the walls. Adamson commented on the forest-like density of the ornamentation, which by design creates the feeling of an intimate and separate space — emblematic of Morris’s utopian ideology — and is used with great purpose by Hermann to provide contrast to her extremely Minimalist, mostly bright white stoneware and cast resin pieces, whose shapes jump out from the dense floral and green background in a manner that reduces them almost to outlines. This examination of the relationship between Modernism and nature is at the core of And dusk turned dawn, Blackthorn, but is also quite personal to Hermann. Her Scandinavian upbringing was set within the prevailingly Modernist environs of Copenhagen, punctuated by regular family vacations to a centuries-old farmhouse, one room of which was papered in the same Blackthorn motif chosen for the gallery.

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