Exhibition / CATCHING WHITE
Jewellery artist Dana Tomečková on the exhibition of Katarína Šipošová in the ČIN ČIN gallery and on intuitive alchemy
Photo: Ján Skaličan.
How to stop temporariness? Make a shell for it.
How to catch snow? Just like anything else. Hold it in your palms. Hands are a form. This snow does not melt, nothing vanishes. (White, Čin Čin Gallery).
In 2013, Katarína dematerialised a pearl necklace (HappyEnd, Eggplant Gallery). Then: By grinding a pearl to the finest dust, she put it to the air. She took the pearl necklace down from a neck and let it float in the room. Now: By compressing the fallen snow, she materialises it forever. She hung the snowball around a neck.
Photo: Ján Skaličan.
White colour evokes purity in the author’s gesture. In thinking of a material, a non-material, in its presentation and technological execution too. It is one line, one stroke. She carefully selects her material, taking into consideration its characteristics and haptic qualities. A sphere is to fit in a hand. I am weighing it. Its unexpected obviosity I get to learn it with surprises me. Inside it is touch. I know its coldness and weight (aluminium, silver). I perceive its fragility (porcelain). And I also remember the thinness of the fallen snow that still holds together (galvanically coated layers of wax). I can barely touch it. A temporary surface.
Even though we look at static objects, they have an inner motion inside. What links them is their state of liquidity, the process of melting – solidifying. By casting materials, Katarína allows things into being (she coats snow with liquid wax, casts porcelain into moulds, casts metal). As if melting was the way snow came into existence, not ceased to exist. The process of making the artwork is part of the installation in a video form. We are watching intuitive alchemy:
Wax is melting in a container.
A snowball is melting in wax.
The hot is getting cold, the cold is getting warm.
The liquid is solidifying, while the solid is melting.
Wax holds snow inside.
Pouring this ball out means getting a negative form. A snowprint from handprints in snow. What is here and looks like a sphere is only a hollow space left after it.
I see Katarína as a quiet discoverer who shows me an empty sphere just like that. And yet many things happened. The revelation of the seemingly simple takes the longest: “It was magical. As if you always tread the same path and all of a sudden you see it, because of someone or something, in a completely different light.” She continues to move the possibilities of instability, transformation (of jewellery and, more broadly, of a material) forward. She turns snow into a material, the temporary into the stable. She makes a snowball into its record – a piece of jewellery, an object that fits in a hand, in a pocket… Her works are an example of the way how the boundaries of the contemporary author’s jewellery are pushed, or how they cease to be important. Should this ball be worn in order for it to become jewellery? It was brought to life between palms. If it is not on a body, if we throw it up high, will it still relate to us?
The exhibition will last until 2 March, 2018 in the Čin Čin Gallery.
Photo: Ján Skaličan.
Photo: Ján Skaličan.