Forget me not

Exhibition at Articulate Project Space, Sydney

Due to current experiences in my life this is a very personal exhibition. Going back to the place of my childhood and living in the house I grew up in, made me think about my life, about the many lives I lived. I met many people from the past, who are now old. With some, I reconnected and shared memories from our past life together. Others are gone forever. This body of works reflects on personal conflicting feelings of aging as the loss of youth but simultaneously as the strength of gaining experience and personal memories. These contradictory feelings are visualised through paintings, which represent snippets of memories of people, who I knew and who I lost. These glimpses into the past are connected to views into the future; materialised by soft sculptures which, with their sexual but simultaneously deformed bodily forms, reference aged but still sexual bodies.

Forget me not, the largest piece in the show that gives the show its name, is an installation of two painted backdrop banners on which lies a bulbous female torso made of white table cloth I inherited from my mother. The layers of white as the fog of forgetting frame windows to the past, which refer to former lives and memories. Bodies caught in boxes. The golden Cage, a recurring image, is a personal symbol representing the home I grew up, a house, which seemed nice on the first view, but for me it was a prison.

Memory-line, the row of painting is depicting events or people from my past. Like memory snippets appearing and fading in the white layers of forgetting.

Still you, I (still) remember you, You know how I feel are soft sculptures that materialise aging deteriorating bodies, which are still sexual.

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Group show at Chrissie Cotter Gallery,Sydney

Hope never dies

This is a body of work based on current experiences in my life. Going back to the place of my childhood and living in the house I grew up in, made me think about my life, about the many lives I lived. I met many people from the past, who are now old. With some, I reconnected and shared memories from our past life together. Others are gone forever. These circumstances made me reflect about my life, especially about my childhood in Germany. This body of works is a view back in sadness about things that got lost but also about valued memories and knowledge that have been gained. It is a call to be playful and never stop searching for who you are and who you wish to become.

These contradictory feelings of mourning and hope are materialised through soft ‘paintings’ that visualise windows to past worlds such as embroidered grandparents’ and parents’ handkerchiefs. They are combined with soft sculptures that with their references to toys but simultaneously sexual but deformed bodily forms create ambiguous identities. All artworks reflect on the issue that I was supposed to be a boy not a girl. This shows in the works through the use of the colours pink and blue. Further, the golden cage is a recurring personal symbol. For me it stands for the home where I grew up, on the surface level a nice house in a beautiful surrounding, but for me it was also a prison.

The golden Cage is an artwork made of 25 handkerchiefs I inherited from my mother and grandmother. Embroidery of symbolic images and sentences from my childhood, for example: Das macht man nicht.

Der kleine Baumeister – Sex is everywhere reflects on that I was supposed to be a boy. Boys play with building blocks, boys build towers, and towers are phallic symbols. However, here the building blocks are soft, the tower is sagging, the seams of the blocks are open as if the phallic tower would grow vaginas.

The crocheted felted soft sculptures Adelheid, Little Tiger and Little Princess also highlight the contradiction between sex and childhood. They are all soft sexual bodies with simultaneously references to toys.

Overall, all works try to evoke a sense of nostalgia and a reference to toys and childhood. This body of work should function as a look back in sadness and sentimentality but also with joy. All works aim to elicit contradictory feelings: sexual, confronting but also humorous and playful.

Badlands_The contemporary Noir

Group exhibition at Articulate Projectspace, Sydney

To visualise new representations of noir that reflect the threat to the self this borderless world poses, Kirsten Drewes’ artwork questions traditional gender roles. Her soft objects make reference to sexual but simultaneously deformed bodily forms and thus create ambiguous identities that unsettle the viewers. The elicited contradictory feelings visualise the dream of a powerful self confronted by the threat of societal circumstances. To depict these conflicting feelings, the objects are materialisations of ‘femme noir’, femme fatales, which are strong and sexual but simultaneously victimised and trapped in their own circumstances. The red velvet and the gold stitching suggest glamour, however, the irregularity of the stitches bares associations to mending wounds. Inserted in velvet and false fur, the intimate vulnerable body parts are emphasised by pink crochet. The sculptures are presented in front of painted banners, which depict power struggle and relationships in a semi-abstract way.

The Sheep that dreams to be a Princess, exhibition at Airspace Projects, Sydney

The Sheep that dreams to be a Princess is part of an ongoing investigation into the ambivalent and visceral qualities of soft sculptures that playfully describe human sexuality, its frailties and its pleasures. To materialise these emotional stages, Kirsten Drewes is working with various tactile materials for example felt, hair and wax. This exhibition shows selected objects from her planned PhD exhibition, which had to be cancelled due to the latest COVID lockdown.

Based on her PhD thesis (titled “Conflicting Resonance: Soft Forms and Materials in Contemporary Art”) where she examined contemporary soft sculpture in its connection to Surrealism through Freudian psychoanalytical concepts, her soft objects employ bodily metaphors with references to the eroticised, violated body. These could be understood through Surrealist strategies that emphasise the psychological processes of desire. All works aim to activate unconscious feelings and conscious thoughts by creating tension between clashing positive and negative feelings. Their anthropomorphic forms draw on the ambivalence of associations to toys and abject objects, which aims to confront viewers with unconscious repressed memories.

Drawing on Surrealism’s central focus of joining reality and fantasy, the title The Sheep that Dreams to be a Princess expresses the unresolvable conflict between everybody’s dream to be loved and desired confronted by anxieties, repressed sexual memories and corporeal reality. All works aim to heighten this tension through materials with contradictory associations and play with gender connotations through anthropomorphic forms and soft materials.

Uncanny is an exhibition in collaboration with Elizabeth Rankin at Chrissie Cotter Gallery, Sydney.

Kirsten Drewes’ soft sculpture aims to unsettle viewers by creating ambivalent tensions between meta-themes such as sex and death, mobilising unresolvable tensions between the desirable and the abject body. By deliberately depicting intimate parts of the body and emphasising sexual connotations through combinations of shapes, colours and surfaces, Kirsten strives to represent personal conflicting feelings related to an erotic, attractive body image confronted with associations to failure and ageing. Her choice of private themes, which are rooted in highly personal narratives, aims for an emotional connection with the viewers’ memories. However, as eroticised, violated doubles of the viewers’ selves, these bodies might also appear uncanny or abject and excavate repressed sexual feelings from the unconscious. By using abstracted bodily forms and soft materials and being a woman artist, Kirsten translates highly personal and complex experiences into artistic forms that push back against familiar cultural forms, representational categorisations, and normative readings concerning traditionally defined gender roles such as stereotypes of femininity.

Photos by Corey Rankin

This series of work is part of an ongoing investigation drawing on the unresolvable conflict between everybody’s dream to be loved and desired confronted by anxieties, repressed sexual memories and corporeal reality. Contradicting feelings of seduction and repulsion aim to undermine traditional stereotypes of societal expectations.

Drawing on Surrealism’s central focus of joining reality and fantasy, eroticism and death, this body of works explores the unresolvable conflict between everybody’s dream to be loved and desired confronted by anxieties, repressed sexual memories and corporeal reality. By using soft sculpture’s ability to evoke ambivalent and conflicting associations in relation to the human body, all works aim to translate personal experiences into forms that destabilise dominant cultural representational belief systems and stereotypes regarding one’s own body.

Photos by Corey Rankin

Barbies is a series of photographs of small objects. The objects contain one or more Barbie dolls wrapped in felt with inlays of human hair. Enclosing dolls in felt materialises the confusion of feeling imprisoned and protected at the same time. There is an overall helplessness that combines with the combination of sexuality and child-like character, bringing to mind Surrealism’s femme-enfant. I have chosen to display Barbies as photographs instead of the real object as photographs have the potential to confuse the scale of these small objects and thus exaggerate the effect of insecurity between real and imaginative.

Wounds and Bandages

This series of works aims to visualise the entanglement of humans with their environment. The combination of the materials wax and wood should express the harmony between flora and fauna through organic forms and smooth, vulnerable surfaces. This combination is extended through elements of fabric, which brings in the aspect of the human. However, similar to the pollution of the environment, the pure surfaces of the wax are disturbed by impure elements, which destroy the harmony and the positive, calming character of the work. The contemplative assemblages reflect on the mourning about the damage done to the environment but they also draw on hope by emphasising the protective associations of wax’s embalming, skin-like quality.

The works are part of an ongoing investigation into the ambivalent qualities of soft anthropomorphic abstracted forms that elicit associations of both, empathy through associations of the human body in a safe and intact world but also to death and destruction. The tension between the smooth, bodily forms and the formless, deflated, dirty parts aim to elicit an emotional confusion that leads the viewers to consciously reassess their perception and understanding of their psychological responses to the works, to their own body and to the exploitation of their own environment.

Christmas at Home

Home can mean a place of security, but also a place of restrictions and tension. In Christmas at Home, the colour green represents both: the associations with the power of recreation and simultaneously with envy and greed.

The installation aims to express the contradictory feelings of relaxing and disturbing atmosphere at the ultimate family event, Christmas. It depicts the typical 'family at home' gathering in their living room, watching TV, eating and drinking. The father and the mother are lounging on the sofa, the child sits secured in its chair, the sausage dog Waldi lies on the carpet. - A family situation everybody knows, in an environment everybody knows: an iconic green landscape painting and a hunting trophy hang on the walls, figurines are displayed on furniture. Every item tells a story of past memories, which become a part of daily life. At the centre of the scenario: the TV as focus of attraction: a soap opera - Little Red Riding Hood is being broadcast.

Christmas at Home aims to express both, the family as an entity of seeming harmony, relaxation or maybe boredom, and underlying disturbing psychological current, which is drowned by overconsumption of food, drink and media entertainment exposure.

A Little Death - Group Exhibition at Chrissie Cotter Gallery, Sydney

My soft sculptures interpret Little Death as the poetic description of death as substitute for orgasm, a definition that stems from the middle ages. My soft forms suggest sexual associations but at the same time are ambiguous about it. They leave open if something had already happened and it is the aftermath of the orgy, or if nothing has happened due to circumstances of age and decay - the interpretation is open to the viewer. Their meaning is ambivalent, it sits between the pleasure of looking at bodily erotic forms, the laughter about other peoples' failure to perform the sexual act, as simultaneously the reminder on the viewers' own dealing with the condition of aging and death. The reaction to the works is gendered: wilts female viewers might experience laughter about the every-day-embarrassment of flaccid sexual organs, male viewers might feel horror as they have to recognise their own possible failure. The works are humorous and funny, but also a reminder of our own mortality.  

Disguised Bodies - Exhibition at Articulate Projectspace, Sydney

With my sculptural objects, I aim to disturb conventional ideals of beauty and suggest different layers of meaning behind the strange and perhaps even ugly pieces. I aim to elicit contradictory feelings in the viewer by creating objects that show beauty and infantile innocence on the first glimpse but also elicit effects of displeasure or even disgust. I would describe my sculptures as scattered objects, disguised bodies.

In the small pieces, I used felt in combination with doll parts and human hair. Felt is considered a protective, warm material with positive connotations, but in combination with the hair and the doll parts, the reading becomes ambiguous. The doll in our culture is associated with beauty and infantile innocence but also with displeasing anxiety. It conveys both, pleasure and displeasure, the living beautiful innocence and the uncanny in-animation.

The two larger pieces, John and Mary, one male one female, made from used, discarded male/female underwear, are in dialogue with each other. The overlay with the slide projection of images of eggs without shell should add a different, layer that suggests the ambiguous image of beauty and failure of two creatures in an enclosed protected world.