Watersheds

Abstract

This exhibition assembles newly conceived works which explore the motif of the watershed. Watersheds (or drainage divides) are areas of land that guide runoff to a common low point. Varying widely in size, these geographical units ensure flow toward a central water body, their boundaries marked only by the divergence of watercourses.

Nature's messy elements, however, are meant to stop at the façade of our homes—industrial drain pipes form an infrastructure that ensures a separation between dry interiors and the turbulent forces outside our built walls. In the sculptural works 'Dividers', these pipal systems are inverted: shown in interior space, as if the architecture had laid bare its own drainage network, exposing its innards. Textile objects serve to extend the system, resembling hooded jackets that, nestled between the pipes, seem to want to guide the direction of the circuit.

First of the rain pipe series, Blattmann’s 'Terminalia' (2023), was originally shown in a sculpture park in Antwerp. It references the ancient Roman festival devoted to the god Terminus, who presided over boundaries. In fetish rituals, the border stones between plots of land were adorned and worshipped as if they were sculptural representations.

For the sculpture 'Watersheds (Portrait of a Drain Pipe)' (2024), the pattern of a hooded (studio-)sweatshirt is reproduced in canvas and covered in layers of acrylic plaster, enhancing every fold of the garment while attempting to imitate the form of downpipe structure, with its gutters and gorges. Not least, the form is also a play on the art historical term Schüsselfalten, a particular style of drapery in classical sculpture, bowl-like folds that tend to be deep and open upwards, as if they could hold liquids, often repeating in cascading rhythms. The sculpture’s final layer is executed in encaustic—traditionally, a painting technique that fuses beeswax and dammar resin to form a resistant compound.

Encausic is also employed in the painting series 'Unclosed', in which photocopies of window frames are conceived of as modular elements, arranged in an ever un-aligning way. The windows are unresolved, they linger like cold cases.

Finally, a work on the floor highlights the artist's interest in models and scaleshifts: 'Model for an Urban Extension (after Merete Mattern)' (2024) is a tribute to the architect who died in 2007 and who defended the unity of architecture and landscape design. Over time, her building environments increasingly mimicked the composition of flower petals; expanding and retracting membranes allowed neighbouring flats to be joined into large arenas for communal celebrations. Her legacy fell into disregard as she was slowly written off as an esotericist.

Nonetheless, Mattern’s 1967 terraced design for the urban extension in Ratingen-West near Düsseldorf was recognised as the only innovative competition entry, intently responding to the call for a new ecological urban vision. Simultaneously, however, the architecture critic Anna Teut revealed the competition itself to be a fraud: while renowned architects were developing their designs, workers were already digging the sewers for the new district according to a generic plan that organised the neighbourhood around a shopping centre, located logically next to a motorway for hassle-free access.