IN GIRO

From the Gothic to the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the churches of the Western world were throughout their history spaces for art and were thus able to become holistic places of education and communication, open to everyone then as now. At the same time, they were often the workplaces of unknown masters, whose different artistic expressions have a lasting effect on the viewer when entering the architectural space.

In dealing with this effect, the artist uses sketches and fragments to explore the original artistic idea in the commissioned work and questions an imaginary/possible boundary between art and design.

In the presented work, she breaks down the floral-looking wood carvings on the church pews of Naumburg Cathedral into individual lines and shapes and reassembles them in a digitally abstracted form. Printed in monochrome on paper, simple centred patterns appear, which only become complex graphics when they are added together again. The folding and transparency of the material used creates additional variations of light and shadow as a subtle reference to the church window. The deliberately chosen square echoes the shape of classic floor tiles and supports the fundamentally circular arrangement of the ornament.

For the viewer, the image of a mandala can arise, which in Sanskrit stands for circle and in Buddhism for a religious diagram. The psychologist C.G. Jung used mandalas as a ‘psychological expression for the totality of the self’. In Naumburg Cathedral, each chair in the jube has a different wooden rosette/circle ornament. JRB