Open Studios
Glogau Residency, Berlin

In parallel with the Vitruvian Woman series, my focus while working in Berlin, was to collect found objects and materials about town in an effort to experiment with recycled materials at a large scale. I saw this not only as a feminist endeavor in order to work at a larger scale, but also as a project I felt encapsulated the spirit of Berlin.

 

One of the recycled material pieces, titled, God is in the Mattress, experiments with this theme.This project is a humorous, albeit feminist, play on famed architect Mies van Der Rohe's God is in the Details, in which the humor lays within the manipulation of the found material. The chiseled texture of the mirrored halves of a roughly 4" thick full sized foam mattress is a result of the tension and force enacted on the foam by my slicing, pulling, and pushing my body into the mattress from all four corners. In effect, this technique of the splitting of foam with an Olfa knife, pushing my way through the material, created a strange blend of topographic and biomorphic textures, and in combination with the symmetry of the two halves, perhaps a spiritual one as well. I decided to further elevate the piece by plastering it in place on the wall, leaving the foam mattress exposed on the edges, as if to reveal the sides of the canvas, or even more, a detail of a wall section.