Life Drawing
German artist Esther Teichmann’s work is full of the breath and soul of life. Drawn to the corporeal, her photography and collages explore desire, nature and our mortality.
Having recently published a limited edition artist book, Drinking Air, as well as a new video work, In Search of Lightening, Twin spoke to the artist about her art…
Drinking Air looks back at six years of your work – while selecting the images for the book did you observe how your work has developed?
The book compiles a selection of works from 2004 – 2010, punctuated with fragments of narrative short texts. The feeling of the whole project (a small edition of artist books) was to have a sense of the process, so it almost functions like something between a sketchbook and book, bringing together fragments of writing, reference images, works in progress and final works.
My work as a whole has continually become more fluid I think. The book helped me think about the relationship between my writing and the visual works, and the way my new film work has incorporated the two into one piece. The book is also sort of inadvertently pre-empting the end of a relationship that spans that period and before. Sometimes you put into writing and images things that you don’t realize are happening in your life.
How does your painting relate to your video work?
Painting into and onto photographs is a very similar process in some ways to collaging different images together or editing/ montaging different filmed shots together and working with voiceover and sound with that footage. All the processes are adding something to the image, while in some ways also obscuring the image. Both the painted photographs and the film work is creating a fictional space, which opens up relationships to myth and narrative
Your film In Search of Lightning is beautifully melancholic – did the images inspire the words or vice versa?
I have actually worked on the film for a long time, but was not sure at first what I was making. I’ve been filming some of the locations without a set piece in mind for over a year ago. Then in the summer of 2010 I was spending a lot of time in the old, forgotten greenhouse attached to the palace in the city I grew up in. I just sat in that space reading and writing, trying to figure out the changes in my life. I wrote the voiceover during the most beautiful thunderstorm and then knew what the film would be. I finished the last filming this summer and then edited it down from hours of footage to just a few minutes.
Where was the film shot?
It is shot in several locations (different swamps, caves and greenhouses) within a few hours radius of my parent’s house in southern Germany in the Rhine Valley.
You seem drawn to nature and the classical body…
I suppose a lot of my work looks at a sense of a primordial space of home – whether in the landscapes of swamps and caves or within the bodies of mother and lover. I am interested in bodies and flesh, in skin and our fragility as well as our strength.
In the film there is a distinct absence of living bodies, the only presence the narrator’s voice describing the physical effects of loss and grief. The statues surrounding her become loaded with narrative in relationship to her words. The discoloured marble statue at the end begins to look like living bruised flesh
As an artist, what drives you to keep creating?
The need to talk about experiences, whether mine or others’, and create a space in which these can be relived, restaged – not within a literal re-enactment, but rather within another space of metaphor and fiction.
The works of other artists, writers and filmmakers makes me want to keep making work and leads me to new ideas. Visiting each other’s studios and spending time with friends talking about life and work, which are never really separate, makes me continue to work. But most of the work probably comes from the things I can’t really even talk about, which is why I guess they become images, films, and stories.
Words by Boudicca Fox-Leonard
