mad odor roses, 2013

Semjon Contemporary, Berlin

For this exhibition I wanted to treat the studio as a kind of testing ground — a place where materials could behave, misbehave, and organise themselves for brief moments before shifting into something else. What you see here are photographs of sculptures rather than the sculptures themselves, because most of the things I was making were never meant to last. I worked with smoke, foam, bubbles, gelatin and other fugitive materials, letting them hold a shape just long enough for the camera to register it. The sculptural moment was real, but temporary; the photograph became the surface where it could settle, at least for a while.

What interested me most was the tension between two and three dimensions — how a modest, ephemeral construction could become strangely monumental through framing, lighting or a change in perspective. The title mad odor rosesgestures back to Medardo Rosso, whose shifting relationship between sculpture and photography has always stayed with me. His work collapses the categories we usually rely on, and that sensibility felt right for a project that is essentially about following a material event as it forms, dissolves and reforms again.

In the studio I tried to act less as a maker and more as a facilitator — setting up conditions, noticing correspondences, and letting materials reveal what they could do under certain pressures or forces. The aim wasn’t illusion for its own sake, but to capture those brief, contingent encounters where something unexpected appears. The photographs hold these small events in place, but they also carry the sense that the work is still in motion, still negotiating its own form even as the image fixes it.

catalogue essay reproduced in text section: fix und flux. Judith Elisabeth Weiss