Small Sculptures

Desiring a house. Window sills to pseudo-casually garnish, tables to set, corners and walls to make distinct, drawers to fill with belongings that could also lie around and be an adorable mess, sleek surfaces to polish. Living is not necessarily a question of prettying up your surroundings or ‘pretty’ is ambiguous but participating in any of the current lifestyles is usually about owning significant things. Before owning comes looking, before looking comes producing. What comes before producing.

Desiring a form. Stone, brass, wood, steel, sand, bronze, leather in conscious hands aiming for something else than making a product. 18 small works, that is 18 pieces of labor, 18 examples of productivity. 18 elevated objects (none of them would probably claim so themselves but many others would). Objects do exist in the world without potentially being a part of someone’s interior design, but decorating spaces is just such a satisfaction. Will it diminish the importance of this collected workload to be wanted and treasured like pieces of jewelry, to be appreciated for its all-round tangibility, its possession-like scale and tasteful expressions.

Desiring materials (this condition has a name). Rounded shapes that gleam with texture, variations of glazed and gilded and honed and painted and varnished matter. 18 suggestions emerging from minds that seem to know what domestic days and hungry materialism look like and are able to place themselves just beside that. Or far away from it. How charming goods appeal to most gazes, affluent and curious alike. These objects would physically fit into any space, they fit right into your eyes like fruits or scale models. Digestible. But they also appear aware of their material origins to an extent where each shape becomes questions rather than answers. We usually furnish our homes with answers.

Desiring closure. It is a human condition, allegedly, to hover above relational issues or any potential inner abyss with an eternal claim to clarification. Impossible to just dwell in the doubt (at least quite stressful). Alternatively: embracing the uncertainty of casting and molding and glazing and carving and surely also embracing the certainty of intentional form giving. Embracing the possibility of downright anti-form. Coincidence and meaning can co-exist within the same small chunks of stuff. Little things seem easier to imagine, easier to finish, to give away.

Outlined material gestures, not as productional shortcuts, but as manageable generosity. This is the scope of a that flutters while it is contained. Adoring beauty is easy, desiring it will eventually be a disappointment, applying some to yourself is usually labor or hobby, acquiring it is an option. Completely encasing yourself in it by way of resources: also an option (but how well does beauty and quantity go along). Maybe well. It feels reasonable to let 18 modes of attention to lived lives pass through you. Sparkling or blueish or highly processed, their heartbreaking artificiality. Their sudden draperies and landscape-ness, how celestial and infrastructural phenomena appear among eels and almost-furniture. The synthetic framing of occasionally breathtaking reality.

Tekst af Nanna Friis

Deltagende kunstnere: Beatrice Alexanian, Luka Jana Berchtold, Barbora Dayef, Ziva Drvaric, Kate Fahey, Julie Falk, Jasmin Franko, Linda Lamignan, Eric Oglander, Elizabeth Orr, Davide Ronco, Astrid Sonne, Jakob Spengemann, Julian Siffert, Igor Blomberg Tranaeus, Anna Walther

Kilde: Sharp Projects