Fotos: Karl Scheuring
The Shape of Rain
The summer of 2021, it didn‘t stop raining. I stood in my studio staring out the window at the rain bucketing, pouring, cascading down. Sometimes it was beautiful with the light shining through the clouds, something quite ethereal, other times it was just black or dark green. Other worldly, threatening and scary.
All over the world we are living with the effects of a changing climate. Droughts, fires, hurricanes and here in Germany, specifically, floods. The wettest, hottest, most extreme weather ever on record, where ever we look. The sadness and frustration of knowing for decades that this would come about if we didn’t steer away from it came to a point of over flowing within myself and my work.
Deluge
The installation „Deluge“ presents itself powerfully, triggering different, very strong feelings and associations. Far above the head height of the viewer hover two zinc buckets and a zinc bathtub, old used objects, not only associated with the „good old days“ but also directly with the element of water because of their two basic functions and contexts of use – that of pouring out and that of collecting liquid. However, the vessels have perforated bottoms and so have lost their original function – liquid can only flow through them. From all these objects, woolen threads in dark desolate colours cascade to the ground like water, virtually absorbing the properties of water into their material: they flow, stream, overflow. Such threads also spill out of a bucket standing on the floor – the flow is seemingly endless. „It is bucketing down“. Will it ever stop, where does it come from?
Text by Martina Köser – Rudolph