Schloss Gleina has been declared a living sculpture, which inspired me to use places designated as where sculptures are meant to live. These niches, their respective forms and structures, provided the platform for combining the feudal history of the schloss with its current condition and the construction and renovation materials being used there. The installations created from found objects shift the focus from nobility to handicrafter, artisan and labourer – those whose work make the quality of living within a structure such as a schloss even possible.

Nook and Cranny Series, by Michael Hahn

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A point of departure for my projects is an examination of the development and use of landscape imagery, and its implications within an expanded field of painting, as it continues to be disseminated for domestic enhancement in an image-obsessed age. From which aspects of the outside do we try to separate ourselves and which parts do we allow to seep in? Is the inside simply a result and reflection of the world around us? Is it also in need of repair? Are we destined to cover layer upon existing layer in evermore radiant gradations? Does a desire for vibrancy impede a sense of darkness?

Bizarre Semblance references the extravagant and complex, especially in ornamentation, which were characteristic of art and architecture in central and western Europe from the early 17th to mid-18th century (the term bizarre being one of the initial words used for the style we now call Baroque).  It also refers to our current, often baffling and conflicting, relationship to nature. I utilized the history, architecture, and current state of the schloss under renovation, to focus on the spaces between interior and exterior environments – their representation, decoration, organization and reflexivity – especially the repetition of found forms as borders, frames and boundaries to be questioned or crossed.

Bizarre Semblance Series, by Elizabeth Gerdeman