Your Custom Text Here
The Sheep that dreams to be a Princess, exhibition at Airspace Projects, Sydney
The Sheep that dreams to be a Princess is part of an ongoing investigation into the ambivalent and visceral qualities of soft sculptures that playfully describe human sexuality, its frailties and its pleasures. To materialise these emotional stages, Kirsten Drewes is working with various tactile materials for example felt, hair and wax. This exhibition shows selected objects from her planned PhD exhibition, which had to be cancelled due to the latest COVID lockdown.
Based on her PhD thesis (titled “Conflicting Resonance: Soft Forms and Materials in Contemporary Art”) where she examined contemporary soft sculpture in its connection to Surrealism through Freudian psychoanalytical concepts, her soft objects employ bodily metaphors with references to the eroticised, violated body. These could be understood through Surrealist strategies that emphasise the psychological processes of desire. All works aim to activate unconscious feelings and conscious thoughts by creating tension between clashing positive and negative feelings. Their anthropomorphic forms draw on the ambivalence of associations to toys and abject objects, which aims to confront viewers with unconscious repressed memories.
Drawing on Surrealism’s central focus of joining reality and fantasy, the title The Sheep that Dreams to be a Princess expresses the unresolvable conflict between everybody’s dream to be loved and desired confronted by anxieties, repressed sexual memories and corporeal reality. All works aim to heighten this tension through materials with contradictory associations and play with gender connotations through anthropomorphic forms and soft materials.
The Sheep that dreams to be a Princess, exhibition at Airspace Projects, Sydney
The Sheep that dreams to be a Princess is part of an ongoing investigation into the ambivalent and visceral qualities of soft sculptures that playfully describe human sexuality, its frailties and its pleasures. To materialise these emotional stages, Kirsten Drewes is working with various tactile materials for example felt, hair and wax. This exhibition shows selected objects from her planned PhD exhibition, which had to be cancelled due to the latest COVID lockdown.
Based on her PhD thesis (titled “Conflicting Resonance: Soft Forms and Materials in Contemporary Art”) where she examined contemporary soft sculpture in its connection to Surrealism through Freudian psychoanalytical concepts, her soft objects employ bodily metaphors with references to the eroticised, violated body. These could be understood through Surrealist strategies that emphasise the psychological processes of desire. All works aim to activate unconscious feelings and conscious thoughts by creating tension between clashing positive and negative feelings. Their anthropomorphic forms draw on the ambivalence of associations to toys and abject objects, which aims to confront viewers with unconscious repressed memories.
Drawing on Surrealism’s central focus of joining reality and fantasy, the title The Sheep that Dreams to be a Princess expresses the unresolvable conflict between everybody’s dream to be loved and desired confronted by anxieties, repressed sexual memories and corporeal reality. All works aim to heighten this tension through materials with contradictory associations and play with gender connotations through anthropomorphic forms and soft materials.
Kirsten Drewes, Visual Artist