For some it‘s just dead tissue, for others a high-maintenance tool to attract attention. The Hair. Even when it is small and seems insignificant, it can have a strong impact. Just imagine finding a hair in your food… Furthermore, it can be a carrier of an entire identity, a trace of your life style no matter how short and fragile it might be. It becomes invisible in company of others, it vanishes alongside of its peers. Anja Heymann replaces yarn with hair and creates something new, puts it into a new context, even brings it back to life. The focus lies on the ancient handcraft process which no- wadays is primarily done by machines. The artist tries to create a graspable reality with hair and needle. Heymann sees herself as a sculptor. Her tool, the needle, is understood ambiguous just like the material: the delicate needle, can hurt as well as join separate parts. However, tool and material vanish into the background compared to the finished piece of art, or the question of what is „in or out“. It gives the „son“ and the „daughter“ a platform of their own. Important is that the artist uses only her own hair which she collects for a long period of time and gives herself a sort of backup of her genotype. The stitchings „fox“ and „bear“ are pieces of exceptional art. The needle becomes material and loses its individuality through a thousand times stitchings. Even its character is changed as the needle becomes an alleged soft fur. Hours, days, months, the artist were stitching needle after needle. At a first glance a rather monotonic procedure, which leads to success only through persistence. This result can be seen as a dissolving of boundaries as well as a game between appe- arance and reality. As an example, the bear becomes a trophy in a glass cabinet instead of being one of the largest predator of our times. But thanks to the artistic approach it remains untouched. Those new art works show that the artist remains faithful to her creative process of the past. This process was always shaped by a strong interest of living creatures, their individuality and the artist‘s impact on her surrounding world. All the art works were literally bound to the reality of her life and become personalised like very few other „sculptures“. And yet, she also fades into the background through the process of abstract stylization. This contradiction allows every onlooker to interpret the objects on its own.
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