Hendl Helen Mirra »Quarry«

The exhibition includes works made with alpine plants that Mirra collected while above the Arctic Circle, which are pressed and labeled as is common for both scientific and amateur herbariums, though the plants here are subtle combinations of more than one species. Mirra’s attention to the correct identification of the plants, despite the idiosyncratic nature of the project, suggests a sympathy with the 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson’s own herbarium that she assembled as an adolescent. A method of drawing as much as evidence of a sincere attention to a collection of humble plant specimens, Mirra’s herbarium is indicative of her experience of the visual and the textual as simultaneous. Mirra’s preoccupation with the materiality of how things live in the world can be seen in her floor sculptures, made with rocks she collected while exploring the Norwegian landscape, and pieces of folded, well-worn wool and cotton clothes from her wardrobe. The rocks are also painted, unnoticable to the eye but importantly to the project, as Mirra is not stressing the natural as untouched and the cultural as its opposite, but instead is engaging the always-active relationship between them. Some of the rocks consist mainly of serpentinite, a green mineral, ubiquitous in the earth’s core. Many of the rocks have lichen growing on them, unimpressively but determinedly. The hues of browns and greens, act as an ordering principle in each arrangement, the colors of the rocks and lichens similar to that of the fabrics, implying sympathy between the materials and therefore their inhabitants. The clothing is a stage for the rock, and the rock is holding down the clothing. The glacial, geologic time of the rocks coexists and contrasts with the brevity of the clothed person’s life, while the lichen’s life span is gauged relatively between the two - growing approximately one millimeter a year, and able to live for several centuries, if provided with a minimum of fresh air. The sculptures are small, not unlike bonsai trees, formally austere and scale shifting.