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Iris Eichenberg
It Is Getting Darker
Time/Time Past
2018
copper, patina
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It Is Getting Darker
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It Is Getting Darker
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It Is Getting Darker
Iris Eichenberg
21 Jan – 15 Feb 2020
“My work is haunted by the human body. Inevitably, in whatever mode or technique or material I begin, the work shapes itself in relation to the human body—whether as a form, a system, a substance, a dream, or a nightmare. Sometimes, individual pieces invoke the body in its materiality, its parts, its operations, it’s familiarity, its complexity. Sometimes, especially in my installations, it evokes the body in absentia, by creating the body’s conditions—material as much as immaterial—of becoming, of acquiring meaning, of being in, or lost in space.
The very concreteness of each individual piece of work in a series—always springing and evolving from specific materials, from the very activity of working upon them—moves me beyond figuration and familiarity. My drive to make is energized by anger as much as it is by passion—feelings of longing, desire, and loss. Sometimes the work is palpably angry with itself. I do not intend to please.
Making things takes time. My everyday impatience—with the world, with people—disappears when materials, or rather, processing or working on and with materials, demand, impose their own conditions of time, of temporal extension, of patience, of humility. I take materials very seriously. My seriousness about things, about making things, my attempt to hold onto the energy of both the material and the process of making, in solitude, ideally connects me, through the work, to a void that may become available to the viewer, as such.
I am an object-maker because I believe in the power of objects. Objects may comfort us, make us present, create an awareness of ourselves. There is no self without objects to make up our constitutive outside, to map out, and to reassure us of our own existence. The objects I create fill the void where words fail us. Objects legitimate our existence. The three-dimensional objects I create, out of familiar, everyday materials—wool, steel, textiles, clay, nails, mirrors, pantyhose—at the same time render strange what we think we already know—about ourselves, about the world.
My work emerges from a desire to forge relationships with others—whether they are other objects or other humans beings. The concentration of making, and the emotional investment that goes into making each piece of work, is at once an intervention into the everyday of the people who engage with it, as much as I hope that the work offers a space for an ongoing conversation, for the development of a relationship between the objects and their owners. What is really important to me is that the work is something that people end up actively living with, objects upon which they leave their mark as much as the objects invite them, urge them, into a mode of engagement that will not leave them, in their turn, unchanged.