(2021)
Taking a walk in a forest landscape can feel like a cleansing bath and provide time for long-awaited reflection or evoke our imagination and creativity. Depending on the timing, experiences, and whether the forest consists of wild or cultivated trees, the experience can just as well be perceived as dull or even downright frightening. Whether it is the wild growth or the straight-lined cultivation that evokes discomfort is, of course, entirely different depending on the individual. Regardless of our more or less empathetic feelings toward the forest, it is an actual source of wood. Wood which, besides being an exemplary material for building things, also gives us warmth and energy.
This very energy has always been an important ingredient in the passionate love affair between Wood and Clay. Something that constantly leads to one formerly strong party losing itself and turning to ashes, but instead causes the other party to harden and become so strong that it can last for an eternity. This act of transformation is, of course, impossible without fire and the fact that humans have two hands and a brain that constantly invent tools for their survival—often at the expense of nature’s best interests. As much as these actions are depleting, one must admit that they are beautiful—the constant curiosity to create something new. But how does one find the balance to create without simultaneously impoverishing our earth?
The exhibition Wood and Clay takes its starting point in the differing properties of the two materials and in the ambivalence between nature and culture.
— Sara Möller, curator Wood & Clay, Kunsthall Grenland
H50 x W80 x D70 (in.)
Juniper wood, found burnt wooden disc and wooden furniture sections, porcelain, aluminum cast, 3D-printed gears, transducer speaker, capacitance sensor, electric motors
Kunsthall Grenland, Porsgrunn, NO
The installation is part of Greenlightdistrict 2021 at Kunsthall Grenland (NO) opening September 18th in Porsgrunn. It’s a creature that senses, moves, and expresses itself. A sense organ made of porcelain with a villus-shaped inside covered with conductive copper hairs that “smells” the air. It reacts to its sensory inputs with a meandering arm of wood, plastic, and motors. A transducer and wooden disc vibrate sounds of expression.
As Donna Haraway remarked, meaning comes from existing in the world – being embodied and interacting in the world. Creating bodily and emotional interconnections to the outside world is maybe more important than ever in these verge-of-catastrophic times.