Kati Gausmann: dancing dough and circumstances
Blog and site-specific project with various materials
katigausmann.wordpress.com
"My artistic method is oriented on processes. It combines acts of drawing, installation and performance (...) The form emerges according to the material, sometimes fleetingly during an action, or as a fixed trace: a heap of clothes, a fabric, a drawing. Expansions in space or across a flat surface, in which movements and rhythms remain legible."
For Frontiers in Retreat, Kati has developed a specific chapter of her long term project dancing dough and circumstances. As a sculptor, she explores the ways in which form evolves from movement. She is fascinated by the ways in which rock is moved by natural forces over different periods of time. For example, how the world turns on its axis and around the sun in the rhythm of the day or the year respectively, or the drift of the continental plates over millions of years, and by how rock is formed and what movements come about during this formation, like the upthrust of mountains as well as their constant erosion due to the movements of wind and water.
The movements may be slow, quick, continual, jerky, soft, rough. These patterns of movement seem to Gausmann like dances, physical-chemical choreographies that appear quite light despite their inconceivable dimensions. She is interested in tracing these choreographies through drawing. The Earth, its rock, seems to her like a dough that forms in movement, and is formed by movements, dancing, a dancing dough with its own temporal beat and rhythm in the varying climatic conditions in each case.
Gausmann developed the project further at Skaftfell in Seydisfjördur, East Iceland in September 2014 and May–June 2016. She continued to work with it at CAN, Centre d'Art i Natura in Farrera, Catalonia in March–April 2017.
