Johanna Love: Artist in residence Druckvereinigung Bentlage

Solo Exhibition of work made during a residency in Bentlage, Germany 2018

As a visual artist, my interests lie in making images that contemplate themes of time, memory and mortality, and often invoke ideas of the ‘technological sublime’. This recent work explores the concept of dust and its physical and metaphysical implications of loss.

This body of stone lithographic prints made during my residency at the Druckverein Bentlage are drawings of microscopic particles of dust, hand drawn in pencil from photographic images captured through a scientific electron microscope. I am working with scientists at The Natural History Museum in London, using electron microscopy to examine dust gathered from my father’s family home in Hamburg, Germany. The house, situated near the centre of Hamburg, withstood the heavy bombing of World War II and in parts it remains untouched, becoming a small museum of memory through its layers of dust.

These scientific images are not as the world appears to us. This is a strange and disconnected world of images manifested through science. The slow process of drawing these images by hand allows me to bring the image back into the physical, material world of human experience and imagination. Through drawing I can re-think scale, materiality and time. As the lithographs are drawn directly on stone, the pencil frottage on tracing paper is made directly from the stone floor within the Bauernhaus of Kloster Bentlage. As the floor is covered with thin paper and pencil is pushed against it, a mass of small particles, forms and fissures appear slowly smothering the paper surface, suggesting the fine layers of dust settling constantly around us.

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