2018
Brooch
Plastic tableware, brass, steel

All photos by the artist.

The coelacanth is the link to a past, irretrievable world. The fossil represents the imprint of the past, the eternal imprint of a past reality. The imprint of evolution, a collection of random changes and events, at whose constantly wandering end stands the world we are currently experiencing. The imprint of what once lived.

So the pieces created here are also an imprint. They are the imprint of the randomness with which the paper responsible for the surface was crumpled, of this unique and non-reproducible union of folds, of mountains and valleys. The randomness that made sea creatures migrate to land, or even judged life as such. The randomness that determines the reality we perceive at the smallest level and which still puzzles the most learned of us today. Chance, which, when the dice are thrown, determines only when they hit the table, which of the six realities of the dice in the air will occur.

In archaeology, the fossil is one of the most valuable finds. The fossil allows us to guess past realities, but at the same time it is impossible to describe them with absolute certainty with our currently available means. The resulting pieces should serve as a “modern fossil”. They are made of a material characteristic of our time, plastic tableware from a Swedish distributor of affordable furniture. If you enter a society that will unearth the discards of our people in excavations 1000 years in the future, the lion’s share of these “artefacts” will probably be made of plastic. The decomposition of plastics can take up to 600 years, and even then no complete decomposition took place, only the splitting into smaller molecules or various chemical end products of varying harmfulness. What could be our downfall is a potentially important opportunity for those who come after us to learn from their ancestors and their behaviour. The plastic parts become the imprint of our society.

The imprinted surface of the molten plastic tableware is divided into the basic shape of a square and its sister, the rectangle. From this, a new surface is reconstructed, which should hold hope in the spirit. The hope that our current problems, of whatever nature, can also be split into small pieces and put together to create something new and perhaps great. At the same time, the idea of precious and worthless, of noble and non-noble, is reconstructed by combining a noble material like silver with a material that is unfortunately too often seen as worthless, such as plastic. At the time of the creation of this work, the cost factor forbade a production in gold, which would however support this analogy even better.

The arrangement of the individual parts becomes a play with forms and becomes a temporary imprint of the soul. A need for chaos or order, for uniformity or diversity can flow into the process of reassembly. The processual nature of the pieces, which arise purely from intuition, spontaneity and play, prohibits rationalisation in the form of work drawing or intellectualised research. The design drawing takes place in the material. Here the work drawing can at most be created as frottage, as a rubbing technique, which gives it an equally impressively natural character. It is, however, only additional playfulness, because the pieces themselves hardly benefit from it and are therefore not better or worse understood.