Intermezzi

Anne Schneider: For many years now you have kept a personal photo archive of landscape fragments ansituations in nature. How did this start, and how do you choose your motifs?

Anna Gille: I have been collecting these landscapes and natural sites since 2011. These are places that I seek out because they interest me in terms of content, as well as motifs that I come across by chance. I am particularly interested in landscape situations in which design and overgrowth meet, and in which the human touch is sometimes more, sometimes less visible.

In general, my motivation for capturing a particular scenery is immediate and intuitive. I use the world that surrounds me as my material. For me, photographing the motifs primarily means collecting textures, contrasts, light and shadow, graphic elements, constellations and compositions that serve as starting points for my drawings.

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AS: How do you continue to work with this collection for your drawings?

AG: In my drawings which are sometimes quite abstract, it’s usually not about the real, actual place itself. Instead, I use its textural properties to let something new emerge. If you like, nature supplies me with graphic inventions and ideas that I could never come up with in this abundance.

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AS: As you said, many of your works turn out very abstract as a result, even if they are based on a real situation. Spatial references become apparent only after longer observation, and it´s not clear if these are emerging in the viewer’s own imagination or if are inherent in the picture. How far can we remove ourselves from the image of a landscape without it ceasing to be a landscape?

AG: What interests me are rather unspectacular and unspecific places and sceneries that possess great richness in form and colour. Often the motifs are laid out without horizon and are frequently in portrait format. This immediately sets up a certain distance from the classic landscape picture – which tends to be characterised by spatial depth and a visible horizon line – towards abstraction and flatness. Nevertheless, to varying degrees there’s a reference to nature in all my works.

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Leoni Fischer: In one of our conversations you said that sometimes you feel as if you were carrying landscapes from here to there. What do you mean by that?

AG: Photographs of a specific place often end up in my archive for weeks, months or even years. To be able to really capture the structural core of a motif I usually need spatial as well temporal distance to it. As a result, the immediate experience of nature is transformed into some kind of landscape memory.

I think my view is always shaped by my personal experiences with landscapes, some of which are present only subconsciously. So, the landscape of my childhood has become an inner landscape that I’m probably constantly trying to reproduce without being aware of it.

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LF: In preparation of the exhibition you spent four weeks in Dessau working on your pieces for the exhibition on the Raumbühne, the Spatial Stage of the Bauhaus Museum Dessau. What impressions did you gather? Are there places here that have become part of your landscape memory?

AG: Yes, definitely. Here, too, it’s mainly the non-spectacular situations that stuck in my mind. For ­example, the alley of birches framing the parking lot behind the Bauhaus building, which in winter has a very graphical appearance, or the planting next to a small private footpath in Gropiusallee. And then, of course, the pine trees around the Masters’ Houses!

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LF: What do paper and charcoal mean for you in the context of your art?

AG: These are the ideal materials for me, not only because they are made from plants and relate directly to my motifs, but also because they are so essential. Charred branches and twigs, paper and cotton have been used as drawing materials and image carriers since ancient times. For me, in a way, they therefore represent drawing itself.

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LF: The sociologist Lucius ­Burckhardt has thought a lot about landscape, nature and their re­presentation; he said: it’s impossible to draw an ugly landscape.
Do you agree?

AG: When I started using landscapes from computer games as starting points for my work, I was often confronted with the question: Why are you drawing strangely pixelated landscapes from ego shooters? But for me, the question didn’t arise at all, because in the end everything is stimulation and material – whether commonly perceived as beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant. And the question could also be: Why do we see our surroundings as landscape at all? And why do we generally understand it as beautiful?

Leoni Fischer: Matthias, in your practice as a ceramic artist you have been making vessels of various kinds for years, for example bowls, jugs, vases or flat trays. But what constitutes a vessel? When does something start to become a vessel or container?

Matthias Kaiser: It’s a vessel when you can put something in it or place something upon it. However, I don’t just make vessels but actually sculptures, which are planned in every detail or formed intuitively. Within the parameters of utility these objects have fulfil additional requirements: They should be emotive but also serve a practical purpose.

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LF: You have your studio in the ­Austrian village of Grafendorf and find most materials for your work in the immediate surroundings. But you have also travelled the world and have learned new skills in different countries. At the moment you are running a second studio in Benin. What does this relationship between hyper locality and global openness mean for you and your work?

MK: This restlessness probably ­reflects a quest for peace and security. A yearning to feel understood somewhere. But you encounter this feeling only from time to time and not bound to a place. For my creativity, experimenting with different approaches to the same process is an important element. One gains a larger repertoire of formal languages and casts off one’s Eurocentric world view.

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LF: How did the strong relation of your work with local materials come about? Was it common to work like this in Europe at the time when you started?

MK: Not at all, the affinity to impure materials that draw their powers of expression from their inclusions is a result of my engagement with the tradition of Japanese pottery. In Europe the craft of pottery had been pushed aside by mass manufacturing, and the customers’ taste had been steered towards regularity and uniformity. My practice aims to express the magic of the unexpected, the tangible history of gestures and the appreciation of irregularity.

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LF: You once said that you were initially more interested in music than art and design. What was your way into ceramics? And what place does music still have in your life and work?

MK: Music was certainly my first love, and I went to New York to play the saxophone. But a visit to a local pottery market sparked my interest and I did a pottery course, which then led to an in-depth engagement with ceramics as a student at the Parsons School of Design. But even though I no longer make music myself, it has remained a constant companion in my working process and a source of inspiration.

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LF: The art of ceramics is a very ancient, in fact archaic, medium. In archaeology, ceramic finds give insights about the people who made them and the places in which they were produced. What’s your relationship to the landscape that surrounds you and the materials it consists of?

MK: I love nature and I want to bring attention to the value of “unspoilt” nature through my work. The cycles of growth and decay are mirrored in forms and surfaces of my vessels. My aesthetic ideal is inclusiveness: not only awe at the sublime, but also an awareness of decay are part of it.

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LF: The objects, that you created for this exhibition, also incorporate your impressions of ceramics that were produced at the historic ­Bauhaus. What ideas guided you in this?

MK: Here I refer less to the formal language of Bauhaus ceramics and instead oriented myself much more towards the Bauhaus understanding of crafts and art as equal partners. In this spirit I tried to generate a new type of Bauhaus ceramics that corresponds with my own ideas about the encounter of the potter’s craft with the challenges of society.