Sandra Meisel

My photographic and sculptural works focus on physical and mental states poised in a fragile balance that threatens to tip or overbalance at any time. Integrating found objects and recycled material, my installations and sculptures are based on minimalistic and precisely calibrated arrangements. The tense relationship between fragility and solidity finds its equivalent in the materials used, in their various meanings and allusions. While my...

My photographic and sculptural works focus on physical and mental states poised in a fragile balance that threatens to tip or overbalance at any time. Integrating found objects and recycled material, my installations and sculptures are based on minimalistic and precisely calibrated arrangements. The tense relationship between fragility and solidity finds its equivalent in the materials used, in their various meanings and allusions. While my works often bear reference to everyday functional design, industrial mass production and architectural functionality, they as well evoke a surreal, almost somnambulant aura.

Organic elements blend into technologic, banality and meaning merge. A window shutter, functionless, dangles from a black wooden construction. A black fetish completes the scene. A piece of metal twisted into a spiral or a lump of construction foam can become archetypical forms associated with fears and yearnings, sexuality and physicality.

My sculptural and photographic work describe very personal states, yet without responding in an obvious manner: Layering, the merge of conditions, personal loss as well as the status of not being able to control certain conditions, doubt and sensitivities.
Blind restlessness blazes around pure functionality, responsibility and duteousness. Dealing with the unconscious and its border leading to insanity, are recurring subjects of my works.

For my installations I take up on site-specific conditions and circumstances and choose present outstanding elements of the location, repeating and rearranging them in a new manner. The exhibition space hence evolves into a modified space, an utopia - a magnetic field.

I am interested in the possibilities of presentability and the transformation of psychological contents and references into sculptural assemblages. I often emphasize their effect through a re-arranged order and structure. I switch above and below, in – and outside or change the element’s materiality. I wedge materials into organic – cranky forms, knot, bend and stretch them up to their maximum limits.

My sculptures reflect a balance of radical counterparts: By using paint and resin, sleek surfaces are scarred and soiled, massive forms pretend to be weightless, apparently uncontrollable, rampant structures are tamed through architectural patterns and layouts.

These artificial site-specific constructions are up against my photographical works, which are marked by the quest of a maximum of immediacy. After years of working with digital photography I now return to analogue photography: The results are pinhole camera photographs and photograms, as well as cyanotypes (iron-phosphate prints are one of the oldest photographical fine art print procedures). The waiver of a lens associates with alchemistic processes and the attempt of overcoming the separation of viewer and article, subject and object. I am interested in the unpredictable aspects of analogue photographical processes: overlapping and blurring occur.