TO BE LOST IN AN OBJECT is a retrospective exhibition installation of Susanne Hangaard’s works from the past seven years.
All the pieces are physical investigations – mainly using the ceramic medium – of the relationship between object and body. Susanne is personally invested and involved in the installations. She functions as a canvas for familiar decorations or appears in the guise of Joy, the doll – a young girl at the threshold to puberty, puzzled by her own emerging sexuality, surrounded by shame balls and gold.
The same shame balls are shown encased in plaster moulds and decorated in dyed pink or marbled surfaces. The shame balls reappear in the golden porcelain chains, GOLDEN SHAME.
The ceramic objects are either encased or gilt. The artist manipulates the malleable material of clay. Clay, which can be transmuted into anything: a porcelain doll or a brown shame or a precious golden necklace. What is real? What is surface, and does it cover up something dirty underneath? The uniform, the decorated shell that conceals the truth?
Joy, the doll, gazes at the pieces and marvels. The scales shift; the child is three metres tall and not quite so innocent.
Susanne is a maker – both artist and craftswoman. An artists who crafts artistic objects by hand. And sometimes she crafts them using her body. Her work springs from her own experience and her own body in the world. She examines the body’s relationship with objects and explores her own body’s being in the world. From literary descriptions of how objects become physical symbols of human debasement to absurd clashes between classic porcelain decoration and the naked body. It is all a little too much, too big and very recognizable, very universal and very human.
April 2017 // Bettina Køppe
