In some way, Fanny Hellgren’s works complete themselves.
Process-based, they are the markers of a dance-like interaction between the artist and the material, in which the artist begins the process, then allows for the material to express itself. The form is derived from the inherent qualities of the material (the paper pulp) to which Hellgren’s hands attend and respond. She touches the matter, which responds to this touch, which is in turn responsive to the matter, which again responds to the touch and so on, the process continues.
Until placed in the gallery. To be seen.
But the traces of the hands remain on the works and at the wake of the encounter between the artist and the soggy paper pulp, we are left with the dry fragile tapestries, full of holes and scratches. The vestiges of touch embedded in the works evoke visceral reaction, rather than a distanced, contemplative and domineering gaze.[1] Their tactile quality inspires our desire to come close and touch them; and to touch (or to imagine oneself touching) is to feel, to sense the materiality on (and of) our own skin. Like paper pulps, we too are made of fragile, impermanent matter. The damaged, fragmentary, and withering works are thus a mirrored-reminder of our own fragility and transience; of the time passing through.
Abstracted from falling apart, the paper pulps are turned into postures, but this is only a temporary pause (a pose) before their further transformation. Captured on their way to deterioration, on their way to disappearance, they elicit a sense of halt which is felt as a moment of silence and stillness; a moment of equilibrium that is registered as suspension of noise, movement, and thought. The kind of stilling and silence that Susan Sontag describes as “a metaphor for a cleansed, non-interfering vision,”[2] where not adding thoughts to the works signifies that they have been “rightly perceived,”[3] like a landscape might be. In this non-interfering encounter, the space for intuition is left open.
Intuition is silent.
Our own experience of holding time still is, therefore, not a desire to prevent (to stop) the ongoing changingness of things, but an experience of presence and clarity; a state of “aesthetic weightlessness”[4] that once again mirrors the weightlessness of the works themselves which although fixed to the walls remain subject to crumbling (in the middle of the gallery floor) and eventual dissolve.
As they balance on the edge of falling apart, Hellgren’s works are left with the sense of aliveness. The initial logic of the continual process with which they began remains, therefore, embedded in them and the brief moment of placing them up on the gallery walls is only a photographic pose (pause) that fixes momentarily but never (de)terminates or concludes. Hellgren is not creating a finite, immobilized and deadened works, but the ones that are continuously agitated and susceptible to the passage of time which will eventually efface them. This “delightful horror”[5] is a celebration of movement of life and refusal to create inert objects that we could poses as an attempt to freeze ourselves, to escape our own mortality.
The presence we feel in the presence of Hellgren’s works is therefore HERE that goes beyond. It is not HERE of frozenness but HERE of apprehension. An awareness of the inability to hold things still, in the state of permanence. It is the stillness within the passage of time. Silence that is a full understanding. Presence that is an actual extension, expansion. It is a refusal to conquer space and time by the power of the intellect. It is a sense of unison with the natural breathing of life.
This process of submission rather than control, the zen-like “decision not to assert but rather to let happen what may,”[6] is a reflection of Hellgren’s own process of making, which is also intuitive and unassertive. Our experience, in other words, is a response to the artist’s own suspension of thoughts, her own inner silence; in which works are left free, to complete themselves.
IRA FERRIS Curator and Art Writer
November 2019, Sydney, Australia
Text written for the exhibition catalogue of Fanny Hellgren’s exhibition ‘Withering Postures’ at Nevven Gallery in Göteborg, Sweden, taking place from 12 December 2019 to 16 February 2020.
REFERENCES:
[1] “The sense of touch removes the experience of distance, of contemplation, of domination,” writes Rosalind Krauss in Optical Unconscious, chapter 6.
[2] Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Documents of Contemporary Art: Boredom, (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2017), p105.
[3] Sontag writes: “The spectator would approach art as he does a landscape. A landscape doesn’t demand from the spectator his ‘understanding’, his imputations of significance, [...] it demands, rather, his absence, it asks that he not add anything to it. [...] In principle, the audience may not even add its thought. All objects, rightly perceived, are already full.” Ibid, p105.
[4] An expression used in somewhat different context and with a somewhat different meaning by filmmaker Jonas Mekas. See Documents of Contemporary Art: Boredom, (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2017), p89.
[5] An expression used by philosopher Edmund Burke .
[6] Moira Roth referring to the works and processes of John Cage. See: Documents of Contemporary Art: Boredom, (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2017), p75.
ARTEMIS PODCAST WITH THE ARTIST
Podcast interview with Fanny Hellgren, recorded on the occasion of the exhibition Withering Postures can be listened to via Artemis Projects soundcloud.
FURTHER DETAILS ABOUT THE ARTIST:
For more about artist Fanny Hellgren see: www.fannyhellgren.se