Waves of Time

There are moments when

the past ceases to be a form

of the present.

Rain and tears

Look alike.

– Etel Adnan

Black cords wrapped in yarn wind their way through a woven landscape of tension belts embroidered with numerical codes. Affixed to this surface is a piece of cotton fabric previously twisted and rolled in volcanic ash. This large-scale textile work by Marei Loellmann is titled Mother of Time, Daughter of Destruction, your feet are light upon the water (2023). It’s an example of the artist’s process-oriented and material-focused practice, in which she reflects on the relationship between humans and their environment. Loellmann collected the ash used in this work from La Palma’s Tajogaite volcano, which originated in 2021 – when lava made its way across the island all the way to the ocean, burying plantations, houses and streets. But to the local population, the volcano does not only mean destruction. It also symbolizes an ending and a beginning, both part of a transformative process. The nutrient-rich volcanic ash stores sunlight and water, and soon after the eruption, new life in the form of green shoots can be seen breaking through the meters-high piles of ash. This cyclical understanding of life and nature stands in contrast to the industrialized, capital-driven world in which progress and growth are viewed as temporally linear. The luminous green numerals stitched across the black tension belts woven into a single surface speak to this world shaped by systems and structures. But the fabric treated with ash, its folds and the root-like cords worked into it begin to permeate this structure, a still-barren landscape slowly taking shape. Individual particles of dust shape-shift with the changing direction of the light, imbuing the material with life. Through her unusual combination of materials, structures and colors, Loellmann initiates an aesthetic-utopian moment of metamorphosis, a moment in which the past ceases to exist in order to make room for something new.

The interrogation of the human body in interaction with its environment plays a significant role for Loellmann, who studied fashion and stage design. Influenced by textile structures and their composition, Loellmann confronts presumed opposites on a material level. In her series Dis-/Jointures (tapis concrète, 2018–2021), she rearranges the parameters of her materials step by step, inspired on the one hand by the concrete that dominates urban architecture, and on the other by her inquiry into the term, function, and aesthetics of carpets. Out of ash and different types of soil, she creates a more elastic concrete than the type made of sand and cement so ubiquitously visible in the construction industry. The fly ash is filtered out of the air, a byproduct of burning hard coal. The artist enriches the mixture with pigments and conjoins the dyed, cast pieces with leather, silk and other fabrics to create collaged tapestries. In a collaboration with designer Ebba Fransén Waldhör titled U-D-B-U that began in 2019, Loellmann expands further on the malleability of concrete. A fine web of beige-brown woven linen strands holds up a layer of cement in a vertical, even floating position – or is it the other way around, is the cement holding up the weave? In this series of spatially situated works, boundaries between carrier and carried, firmness and flexibility, transience and permanence dissipate. Loellmann investigates the qualities of her materials, agitating the assumptions underlying human perception and referencing an understanding of matter in the vein of philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad, who writes that “Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things.”(1) The idea of matter as “agentive,” as a driving force, incorporates an intentionality and a consciousness. Loellmann’s works illustrate the search for new levels of meaning through a receptivity to the power of matter, which makes them emblematic of the reciprocity of influence between humans and their environment.

In the series Crossings (2021–2022), different components are contrasted with one another through color and composition. Here, too, threads have been made into a net that holds the artworks. The artist pours cement mixtures of fly ash from brown coal and charcoal production over the mesh, hiding it from view save for individual curvatures or rectangles. Loellmann fills these by weaving patterns of brightly colored threads into them, a highly detailed and time-consuming task that she views as essential to her practice. Psychoanalyst Lisa Baraitser examines moments of “time’s suspension,” (2) meaning moments where time stops or is delayed. Baraitser’s book Enduring Time proposes a different idea of the future, one that has lost faith in progress and development after the end of modernity. For this reason, the author sets particular store in actions and abilities that respond to the present rather than striving into the future. Loellmann’s flowing collages are produced in long, enduring processes. Her focus on manually assembling her work emphasizes a grounding in the here and now, where her hands work, continuously engaged with the material. The time devoted to this process remains inscribed in the matter, in which activities of breaking open and piecing together exist parallel to one another. In the summer of 2023, Loellmann’s floating textile installation on Berlin’s Spree river titled Time is no river but a lake, in which past, present and future flow into each other gave form to the dissolution of a linear idea of time. Here the artist uses mud from the bottom of the river, which owes its brown color to the iron-enriched water – a result of mining and an example of industrial and topographical transformation. She also collects lichen, bacteria, algae, plants and rusted objects found in the water, which are transferred onto the fabrics in a process of drying and fermentation. The non-human actors become participants in the creative act, resulting in fabrics that carry stories and store memories. They tell of an industrial world and its implications, and of how the past carries on into the future. They also reflect connections we make, consciously or not, with other beings on a daily basis. These bonds are elementary and engender transformative processes. They can also be found in Loellmann’s way of working. Again and again, she probes new forms of collaboration, methodically familiarizing herself with different artistic positions, for example in her work with the traces collective. The multilayered textures produced both in her individual and her collaborative works all manifest a poetics of ephemerality and renewal.

Through her process-oriented approach and her exploration of matter, Loellmann reveals the complex interweaving of humans and other actors, allowing categories like “natural,” “artificial,” and “human” to coalesce. Loellmann’s work foregrounds matter’s capacity to act, as called for by Barad – provoking a shift in perception so profound that it calls into question hierarchies both individually internalized and socially determined. The world around us and the materials that shape it are in a state of constant flux, as is our bodily relationship with them. The artist describes this understanding of plasticity, as well as the choice to engage with the power of materials in her work as a “becoming materialized out of the practice.” (3) When concrete, for example, becomes physically malleable, or fine threads become capable of holding up a cement mixture, then the artist has succeeded in opening up new material parameters. Loellmann’s work encourages us to question ingrained assumptions and reminds us that transformation is a continuous process in which past, present and future are indivisibly interwoven.

Tomke Braun
Translated from German by Moira Barrett
2024


(1) Jensen, Thomas Bo; Dayer, Carolina; Foote, Jonathan. Imaginaries on Matter: Tools, Materials, Origins, ebook, 2023, p. 74.
(2) Baraitser, Lisa, Enduring Time, London 2017, p. 2
(3) Artist’s statement, 2023.