METAPHYSICS OF CORE MATTER
since 2020
EXPANSION OF THINGS – SUSTAINABLE PHOTO PRODUCTION – THE NATURE OF THE ARTIFICIAL – MATERIALS MATTER – TEMPORARY SCULPTURES – RISE AND FALL – SQUANDERING – STRATIFICATION – PILING UP – BANTERING WITH REASON – THE TOOLBOX OF MODERNITY – MATERIAL INNOVATION – INDUSTRIAL OUTPUT – CYCLICAL APPROACH - RE-SOURCE – THE FOAMS PARADOX – ANTHROPOCENE
The project 'Metaphysics of Core Matter' is about the artistic investigation of commonly used modern and contemporary material, possibilities of its sustainable innovation and its integration into artistic practice in terms of material and their use for example in packaging. This refers to materials like foams, polystyrenes and aluminum, coming through often risky extraction techniques from the core of the earth. I stage these leftover materials from private consumption, logistic fields and industrial production as temporary sculptures photographically in my studio. My project goes hand in hand with the rediscovery of domesticity during the crisis years 2020 and 2021 and the materials of our everyday comforts, which reach me in this time.
These materials and their unique use for the industrial and personal comfort is the material I reuse in my work. Exciting in its ambiguity to me is as well how a human will has pressed itself into this material, these industrially, geometrically and logistically useful pressed forms that loose so quickly their sharpness and crumble into harmful microparticles. How this only just expressed vision of perfection changes to something unpleasant to get rid of.
This falling away from the things we desire is staged, piled up, crowned by me. It is the fiction of an ascent of material, but it also shows the transience of this and the rational hubris of its inventor and disposer. I see it like a fruit that you peel. While the peel is the nutrient for the tree, which should be able to produce fruit again next year. But if you do not give anything back, then you are not getting into a cycle of maybe expected enrichment, but one of impoverishment. My work as an artist is a temporary ordering of a chaotic environmental state and a joking with the contextual forms of exhibition presentation of the white cube and the pedestal culture, in other words, that which needs to be considered in a concentrated way and in a contemplative offside. A subtle play with the assumptions regarding myth and progress, practical solutions and their ecological downsides.
Then I recently started adding to the mostly private environment also visits and photo shoots in companies that are dealing with packaging, recycling and material innovation. At latest when I was thinking about the way of how presenting the work and what would be the responsibilities of my own making a partnership with Recom Art Berlin came into being, a worldwide operating company of high quality photo production and research. Recom and I, we are now working together on possibilities for more sustainable photo production. My aim is to use sustainable materials in my image production and presentation form, in order to contrast the unique use and transience of the selected materials put into shape. This contrast is intended to bring out the molding of the world through a massive use of environmentally unfriendly materials in my work.