13 weeks of new life
Arrival at Sundaymorning EKWC
wrong this is the departure 5,30 in the morning
this is it
open doors,
strange creatures
and unexpected messages welcomed me.
It seems almost like a dream
For who wants to know this is my workplan for these 13 weeks:
The first experience I ever had with artistic practice was a ceramic course, and it was this first encounter, that actually brought me to the idea to engage with art.
My whole life I have been engaging and somehow challenging the limits and the possibilities of different materials.I have studied painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, I then passed to the restoration of churches, to painting on silk, to restoring XV and XVI century golden frames, to realize handmade tapestries, and then (I am avoiding to go through all the experiences I had) to realize contemporary jewelry.This has brought me to use wood, metal, stones, plastics, foam, paper, to name but a few, to realize my projects.
Since 2010, I started to reflect on my own life investigating myself and all the forgotten routes I have been taking. Therefore I started a new project, which consists in collecting the drawings I have made myself in the last 30 years, depicting my son and my daughter growing, my husband, my friends, unknown passengers, places I have visited, things I have seen, dreams I have had, ideas that briefly passed my mind. I also started collecting drawings from others, mostly children or my students, taking their first formalization of ideas or of the world around them.
I then fragment these pieces, I re-create the chaos that memory realizes, to then reassemble them again in new ways and forms, giving them a new birth.
The process resembles the mnemonic process of our brain, our attempt to remember, the impossibility to do so totally, the nebulous and foamy images that come back to us and the capability we have to create new figures and representations out of them. The fear of such inevitable incompleteness, as well as the beauty of it is what attracts me the most. Especially today where the velocity and amplitude of information, makes any experience brief, any recollection more difficult, any remembering more volatile.
Now I would like to transfer this process into ceramic and especially porcelain. Its solidity and fragility, its delicate materiality and elegance, its roughness at the starting stage and its incredible beauty once it griddles, once it transforms, flick from a ducky to a swan, makes it be the perfect materialization for my idea.
Furthermore there is a special element in this technique, that somehow resembles my own history, in the necessity to engage in an almost intimate relation with the hands to be modeled, the fact that even my own body temperature affects the resolution of the piece. I have to engage with it physically and personally, with a sort of a physical attention.
I have been exploring the third dimension that a different material could create since several months, using modelling clay and papermachè. The outcomes so far are interesting but the medium is just not the right one.
My plan is to use this residency to make series of small scale sculptures in ceramics and porcelain to deconstruct them and start a reconstruction to build larger scale sculpture and maybe also jewelry.
I really hope I will be able to live up to my own expectations, in any case a daily report will follow.
dorismaninger 