TWO FEET SEVEN INCHES

Power Plant, Kunsthal Nord, Copenhagen / Aalborg, Denmark

2018

Climbing up Together, with Sara Grotenfelt, Antonia Harke, Mikkel Mallow, Julia Müllner, clay / ceramic, Copenhagen

For Stella Geppert, sculptures are primarily understood as consequences of bodily actions and behaviors, produced by social, material and spatial conditions. For the work 2 feet 7 inches Geppert researched the movements of coal miners throughout history and the way their bodies contributed to the industrial production of energy. In collaboration with performers, a series of sculptures and drawings were made that took as their starting point the measurements–2 feet 7 inches–of one of the earliest known coal mines in the world, as well as a selection of movements encountered by Geppert in her research.

Comparing and conflating the processes of material and social production, Geppert’s works explore how the human body and mind are situated in-between these two realms. Instructing the performers to embody the sentiment of being in a very narrow space deep underground, rather than accurately reproducing historical gestures, Geppert stages a situation where the actual conditions of the power plant and the imagining of a past experience bleed into each other–for the performers as well as the audience. The resulting sculptures–reminiscent of furrowed lands or turbulent seascapes–are similarly poised between being matter-of-fact evidence of applied physical pressure, and the poetic expression of imaginative, interior landscapes.
(Lisa Rosendahl: Aalborg, 2018)