Hendl Helen Mirra »Opålitligt«

After a nine year phase of weaving, in 2021 I gave away my tapestry looms, because I wanted to shift from the sharp focus of detail orientation to the soft focus of open awareness. The weaving process had become too familiar, and I wanted to return to not-knowing. What has remained is an intimacy with my day to day experience, tuned in at a low volume, and an ardency for aimless walking.

There are some paintings that index the walking: reverse “replicas” of irregularly shaped wood carved trail signs from the Sierra Nevada mountains. They allow an imaginary liberatory situation: both behind the sign (a signifier), and in an actual place that is beyond any naming – unsignified.

And there are some vertical planks of wood that lean, each with a calligraphy of two turning words, drawn on thin paper, mounted as a veneer. Beginning with both arms outstretched, with an ink brush in each hand, simultaneously writing forwards and backwards. They are in cursive and they are not neat. Rather like seaweed. There is lightness in the words and images and weight in their objecthood. Traces of breathing and easeful attention. I call them peripheral calligraphies.

There are two readymades. One is a remnant of a wood ruler, found on a slope in South Tyrol. The other was found in a scrap pile at Waldau, the psychiatric clinic near Bern where the synesthete writer Robert Walser lived for some time. It is a bar of wood, painted green and well-worn.

All the works, though visual, are not about seeing, but rather signal sensorial being, infinitively living a temporary life, and being peacefully and namelessly emplaced.

– Hendl H Mirra