Maja Gade Christensen (DK)Ruiner i fuldt flor13 - 15/8 2021I am interested in landscapes, how different processes create and change a landscape. It can be how water moves through the landscape. How it carves gorges in mountains and deposits sediments in lakes, or the changes in landscape if water disappears, lakes and rivers dry out and life disappears. A desert landscape arises where only traces of life are left behind. It is a slow and natural process of erosion and deposits. The changes happen over millions of years. A human has a relatively short timeline compared to a rock. Humans have a need to seize the landscape by cultivating, creating gardens, building up and tearing down. They change the landscape to fit people's agenda. Mapping the landscape is a way to gain power over it, stretching a grid over it and trying to catch reality in the squares of the net. Hiking through a landscape can give a physical and bodily understanding of the landscape. When I walk on the beach finding small pieces of bricks, ground round by the waves, I start thinking of all the energy needed to create the brick, to dig up the clay, clean the clay, shape it into bricks, to dry and burn it. Transporting the bricks to a building site, perhaps building a house where people lived out their lives. At some point there was gentrification, the house was demolished and the construction waste ended up in the sea, maybe as coastal protection. I feel like keeping the little piece of brick, to give it a new life. The exhibition Ruiner i fuldt flor (Ruins in full bloom) consist of the artworks Aflejringer (Deposits), Netværkskonstruktioner (Network Constructions) and Ruiner i fuldt flor (Ruins in full bloom). Aflejringer(Deposits) is a series of aquarels imitating water movement through a landscape. The drying out of the colours on the paper is a reference to water drying out in a landscape. Netværkskonstruktioner (Network Constructions) is a series of sculptures using the net as an aesthetic form. Ruiner i fuldt flor (Ruins in full bloom) consist of a series of photogravures printed with powdered bricks as pigment. As an interaction with the photogravures is a stone garden created from pieces of bricks found on the beaches of Copenhagen and Malmö. Maja Gade |