Gold patina
Unconsciously seeping in
An interstice of thoughts and reality
Cascading clay, an ear, a hand compressed
She, her behind the mirror
In Bettina Willner’s new body of work Mirror she explores her own subjectivity and mines ideas around dreams and the subconscious. The internal self and represented self can be very different images, experiences and imaginings. What is looking in the mirror and what is staring back is multitudinous, varied and changing, a shifting space constantly evolving and influenced by time, place, experience, memories and the weather of emotions.
In our conversations Willner expresses ‘What we see in our reflection is how we feel about ourselves. This changes continuously. Mirror asks us to look inside ourselves and in turn be our true selves. The sculptures in this exhibition are part of a dream-scape. I am present floating and existing within the landscape, connecting with other natural forms. Part plant, part shell or bloom like statures.
Mirror is an experiment in visualising the veil between what is internally felt to what is externally presented. The works draw inspiration from Surrealist Sculpture, Willner purposely references female forms and initiates a perspective of a women’s mind and experiences. Still an incredibly important view considering male surrealist artists are first identified in search engines unless delving deeper. When Rita Kernn-Larsen (1904-1998) has as a ubiquitous data imprint as Salvadori Dali maybe our work is nearly done? This deep dive is also where Willner necessitates her work. The female voice is as notable as female shapes and forms in Mirror, like Rita Kernn-Larsen’s oil painting Behind the Mirror (1937), a light turquoise female figure descends a sky-blue staircase, the stairs are an entry and exit from the frame, outside the frame lives a coral-red figurative sculpture. There are black and red wavy lines tipped with fire or red leaves. In this exhibition cobalt veins are painted on the exterior of Willner’s sculptures weaving and crossing like veins beneath the skin. Painting and sculpture hold hands in this exhibition and expand to bodily proportions, an evolution from smaller scale and ornamental references. An engagement with the mind and body, intuition is sculpting and painting clay in these works. There are hidden paintings under gold glazes, invisible to the viewers eye, a detail in experimenting and imaging intuitive thinking and feeling.
Two major veins of work defined surrealist sculpture: the “biomorph” and the “objet trouvé” - giving two-sided insight into the way the imagination works when attempting to materialize the pure unconscious. In the former, we find abstracted shapes and forms created through organic, emotional association.
Arboreal figures sprout, flowers bloom where the head of a figure would be situated, the body a trunk or stalagmite. There are organic forms with smooth curves like boulder stones and more flexible forms with folds like a skin creasing when a body bends and twists. Bodily textures are on the surface of the works and clay is manipulated to produce smooth, indented and rough exteriors. Willner’s openness to the world, detailed attention to the universe and to nature seep into her unconscious mind uniquely conjuring her senses in the shaping of these objects. Mirror is an investigation in emotional association and imagination and an enquiry into how our experiences and visual space mould our inner world.
Written by Caitlin Arwyd
- Email conversation with Bettina Willner, 2 September 2024.
- https://www.theartstory.org/amp/movement/surrealist-sculpture/