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Hinterland

Sandra Schmidt

Tuesday 27 June - 15 July

Notes on Hinterland by Amy Howden-Chapman

The images in Hinterland, Sandra Schmidt’s collection of new works, range in shape from rectangular frames, to forms that are reminiscent of cavernous entrances or portholes. The images appear as if they have been rendered from thousands of pixels barely bigger than pinholes, an effect gained from Schmidt’s choice of material, plastic beads which are designed to fuse when ironed together. The product, Hama, is a children’s toy, but Schmidt uses it to create works with complex textures, works that position rich planes of colour crackling with visual information, against areas of melted monochrome.

In her 2005 show ‘Soliloquy’ at Enjoy Gallery she used the beads to construct a three- dimensional miniature replica of the East German suburb in which she grew up. In these new images, we have entered into the spaces behind the monotonous grids of the modernist apartment blocks. We have simultaneously zoomed in; a window that used to be made from four beads becomes a scene made up of thousands – and zoomed out; we see the landscape that stretches out beyond the confines of the buildings. The works could be constructs of a world as seen by one of the occupants of the apartment blocks. It is as though we see everything with a beaded vision, or through a pixilised window plane. Both the images that feel like domestic spaces and the more open external scenes are rendered from the same, already abstracted material. The fixed size of the beads means resolution will never improve.

The interest in Schmidt’s work lies simultaneously in the repetitive detail and texture of the unique material and the pared-back forms which create illusions of space through their placement. One form often hovers in front of another, deleting the visual information that lies behind it. In another work, the angle of two intersecting planes suggests the shape of an ajar door, and beyond it the view into a darkened room. The graduated colours of flame, lipstick red to darkening embers, are framed and hung on a grey wall.

Colour combinations that symbolize heat have long been of interest to Schmidt and in these new works the explosions that crumbled the monotonous façade of her childhood environments have become confined. Inferno flavored rectangles appear surrounded by a colour close to that of rock, as if we are we are seeing molten matter, surround by the substance it will become – the cooled, the solidified. Other elements are also present; between slabs the colour of ice are areas that tingle with the tones of fresh air.

Within the images, forces collide and evolve, but what always remains is a certain tension between solid forms – constructed from beads of a single colour – and sections that seem like voids, where colours intermingle until the edge of the image slips into darkness.

As an indication of tension in the works, there are areas on the image’s surface where the texture of the individual beads has been melted away. Schmidt speaks of these areas as scars. They are places where the iron has stalled, and like scars, there is a certain discomfort in seeing them. This is partly because they are ruptures in the way ‘Hama’ was designed to be played with. The scarred sections are a transgression of the process, a branded mistake that pushes the material beyond its limit.

Schmidt extends the metaphor of the scar, speaking of the image’s surfaces as skins. They have plastic pores, and like the skin of computer graphics, skin molded from polygons, these images are made from the fusing of synthetic elements. Pattern and space are held together through the application of weight and heat, and indeed Schmidt reminds her viewers that flame is a source of comfort as well as destruction.

The construction of the works in Hinterland is so slow, that it is akin to a form of meditation; each bead is individually paced in position, causing a single work to take untold hours. Schmidt’s works can be seen as maps of this meditation, her images become graphs charting the time spent building their own graphics. The works are renderings of a private geography. The environment depicted has pockets of smoldering embers, and an atmosphere sliced with static. The texture of the terrain sometimes melts away, and cluttered colour crashes against planes of calm, but like any hinterland, any remote or undeveloped space, this beaded world is a place where materials have fused to create sights of unique wonder

Hinterland installation

Eclipse 2006