"Drowning is soft and porous. It feels almost alive. You can see the characters and the stories sink beneath the surface, like a stone dropping to the bottom of a murky lake. The layer of wax obscures what lies below. It tempts the viewer to come closer, take a deeper look, and slow down.
The memories were carefully selected from the diary. They are the saddest moments from the past year. These are the moments that everyone has, the ones that guide our lives but the ones where the details get a little fuzzier each time we try to recall them. Heidi extracts them, nails them down on hardboard, covers them in beeswax, and leaves them to fall away. It is an intimate process of remembering and forgetting, a meditation on revealing and concealing. The finished object asks us too to pause, be quiet, and reflect on what we may be hiding behind our own opaque walls."
-- from Hannah Springhorn's review of my artwork Drowning
My artist's statement of the exhibition:
I lay down in the snow, facing the sky. Some long-lost memory deep down in my head started to pop up, play, and cycle like a zoetrope.
I was sinking.
•••
The lights shined directly into her eyes. There were six of them in a group, which she was already familiar with. Some cold fluid passed through her chest and settled at her neck. Voices bounced in her ears: "Anesthetic injected." Ah. "It was blood," she soon recognized.
Winter night, Grandma was making corn porridge in the kitchen. The window was covered with mist from the steam, blurring the faces of passersby and turning them into moving blocks of colors. For no reason, sorrows began to envelop her. She woke up, realizing Grandma had passed away years ago.
The little girl sat on a bureau next to her window. She was staring at the leaves in the empty street. A streetlamp cast a shadow on the falling ones. "Will Mother come back home? Will she ever come back again?"
•••
Was I drowning, or had the memory floated up to the surface? I heard the noises of the tears slipping down my cheeks. But my crying was soaked up by the white world, echoing in complete silence. I got up, walking back to the crowd, hiding and sealing the memory into eternity. Like tears dissolved in the snow.
The work //dissolved is made up of lines and lines of code in the programming language C++. The original program was to render a virtual world in Computer Graphics. I printed and cut the source code and "dissolve" them into the wax. The lively virtual world is thus broken down to its naked form - texts and symbols, which are then transformed into shapes and sealed within this abstract physical space.
Selected Encaustic Artworks:
