Sarah Pichlkostner: Moss Finger Liquid Soil Dripping Seeds Prodding Eye

Annet Gelink Gallery is pleased to present Moss Finger Liquid Soil Dripping Seeds Prodding Eye, the second solo exhibition by Sarah Pichlkostner at the gallery.

Pichlkostner creates sculptures and environments that investigate invisible processes: the transmission of energy, the passage of time, and our psychological responses to materials and objects. Through a deep study of the behaviour of materials, her work reflects on the social life of objects and the way they shape, and are shaped by, human experience.

The exhibition examines the possibility of an empathic encounter between our dysfunctional Anthropocene time and ecological responsibility. At its heart is a tension the artist describes as "the spatial disconnection between the world one lives in and the world one lives off." The eye and the finger serve as its central figures: symbols of perception and touch, and a model for seeing, approaching and understanding that refuses to escape individual responsibility. These forms are deliberately unstable, shifting in response to the viewer's movement or dissolving through their own material nature, questioning and being questioned in their power, autonomy, and state of in-betweenness.

A video work stages this encounter directly: a human eye and a stone eye meet, and begin to merge, though with different needs. In its prodding, the first produces tears, liquid as a form of transformation; the second remains unchanged. The asymmetry of this encounter, between what shifts and what endures, runs through the exhibition. A wall-based object materialises elements from the video into physical form. Aluminium, as a highly produced modern material, is set against brass chain, which carries a different sense of time and function. A red eye, with a glass-made drop of water, echoes the gesture of prodding and the possibility of transformation.

Moving through the exhibition, the viewer experiences shifts in perspective, movement and merging: a gradual attempt to step outside an anthropocentric point of view. The works are made from discarded and overlooked materials: synthetic materials discarded from everyday use, waste from a wool mill, plastic fibres once used in agriculture and now abandoned in the ground. Pichlkostner re-encounters these objects as what she calls "socio-ecological residues," things that, having lost their original function or emotional value, begin to integrate back into the surfaces and systems around them. In doing so, they raise a question the exhibition holds open: "At what point does an individual's action become part of a system, and thus a shared ecological responsibility?"