For the past years, Laimdota Malle has quietly but actively worked across varied media, including drawing, printing, sculpture, and animated images in order to create installations with a specific interest in questioning meanings of collective and personal experiences. Through her own experiences, sometimes traumatic, combined with the need to research, understand and collect, she creates metaphorical stories that reveal hitherto unknown landscapes and realities that may well belong to the past as well as present and future.
These fragmented landscapes persist in the liminal space and time between reality and fantasy. Using various techniques, she is recording impressions through copying on different surfaces and materialities and recreating images from photographs, in order to build a collection of pieces of everything that surrounds her. Strategic placement of works in several layers and well-thought-out distances, as well as coloured silicone and paraffin sculptures, create animated fragile objects. These objects capture movement and encapsulate memory of something appearing and persisting in the fragile space between our own and other people’s reality. These stories and scenes emerge and tell about the impossibility of keeping something that has decided to disappear and what impressions it leaves behind.
Concept
The installation ‘ooze’ has been dedicated to the theme of vanishing, disappearance, and disintegration. It is explored through translucence, weightlessness and a floating sensation combined with embodiment, even carnality, thus drawing a unique, sensitive look at the impermanence and fragility of all people and things on the one side, and the long-term impressions — memories, copies, dreams — they leave on the other.
The techniques developed for this installation have allowed for the creation of fragile, brittle work that seems to be more felt and experienced than seen, resisting a single and definite reading. The interpretation of this work could follow the object-oriented approach of Timothy Morton (Realist Magic, 2013) who sees all causality as a form of poetry and translation, all art being the exploration of these relationships. Artwork as an object is a liminal thing, impossible to grasp within time or space.
Laimdota Malle is exploring ways how a partly verbalized experience can be translated through materiality. Observing the interactions of various media, taking place in the sum of their intra-actions, she has developed highly charged impressions of reality that invite to question the notions of realness, and acknowledge the unique vibrancy of imitation.
The narrative of the project develops around several characters operating in an environment of forest and twilight. There we can see the little girl Ooze as well as wolves, foxes, adults, and children. Multiple layers of experience are interlaced; the future expected requires acknowledging the past, while the present is evasive, always disappearing. This work is an attempt to capture and visualize something that cannot be seen. The original material — a drawing of a photograph, a letter, a crumpled bed sheet
— is blurred and fading, giving up space for not even materiality but its impression in a different form that sometimes reminds of a thin, sensitive membrane of skin through which we can remember the people close to us: not the way they were but the way they moved us.
ooze
“ooze – she – a quiet, shy observer and counter. Her notes capture time and encapsulates motion oscillations and their variable rate. Time – as the engine of eternal movement and doom – ; especially now drags immensely slowly, at the same time rushing and flowing imperceptibly.
In the pursuit of transparency in materiality and in the struggle to freeze or liberate the movements, scenes and stories emerge telling how impossible it is to keep who has decided to disappear and what impressions it leaves.”
Laimdota Malle
