Artist Statement
In my work, I explore the profound interdependence of all living things, revealing the vitality of an animistic, spiritually-charged parallel world.
My practice encompasses large-scale drawings, photos, metal and bone structures as well as cast sculptures in bronze, Jesmonite and glass. The starting point of new work are natural material, abandoned manmade objects and historic tools, which I remove from their original context. Through this simple process they become spontaneously loaded with history, meaning and imagination, provoking a metamorphic process.
The female and male figure, mammals, insects and hybrids, form the centre of my imagery. I draw on a diverse range of artistic and scientific sources from Norse mythology and the Fertility Cult of the Indus Valley to anthropological studies of sacred objects. The resulting body of work weaves a distinctly personal tale related to the Westphalian landscape where I grew up. My work is about archaism, the paradox of apparent simplicity and underlying complexity. I want my sculptures to convey a vibrating force in their totemic stillness. Their disturbing beauty create a feeling of ambiguity and challenge, unsettling our perception of the order of the world.
Furthermore, I observe the historically deep emotional connections between human beings and material objects and investigate the process of attachment which can even lead us to project a personified being onto an inanimate thing. Through our modern fixations with technology and virtual reality, the haptic quality of objects and tools has lost their importance. We have inadvertently designed away the more poetic and enduring characteristics of our material culture and developed a throw-away attitude. The studying of the relationship between emotional attachment and the senses, has led me to investigate the roles that touch plays in our everyday interactions with objects and personal well-being.
Uta Brouet
Uta Brouet