Maria Soilen JahrReproduction
My artworks explore ideas of enclosure, protection, demarcations, symbiosis, parasitism, and transformation. This often through the investigation of different types of containers that have in them a possibility to function as a shelter (a protection either genuine or false), or those being part of closed circulation systems (as inside the body).
The work investigates the body as a container/shelter and the plant/botanical world as mechanisms of growth and nutrition. Combining elements from the two (organs/carnivorous plants), closed imaginary systems are formed. They seek to explore the fragility, vulnerability and order of different natural mechanisms, networks and processes. Contrasting life-giving organs with carnivorous plants also introduces ideas of life and continuity opposed to death.
My works deal with the beauty of what is often experienced as repulsive. The beautiful, protective and pleasant are often contrasted by an aspect of its opposite: the fright lurking that can call upon the uncanny.
Referencing the current climate of biotechnology, the work aims to investigate how natural shapes relate and interact, questioning the body as a machine and an interdependant or parasitic relationship with the plant/botanical world.
