OTHER WORK: Installation

Thin Air, 2007

An installation, Thin Air comprises 19 sheets of illuminated hand-cut vellum. For this work I adapted an Ottoman embroidery pattern incorporating both flowers and elements of an Eastern Wheel of Life. I integrate cuts representing ripples and bubbles of water, which, like fountains, obscure. It becomes a landscape imagined. 

The viewer passes through tapestries of shadows. Weaving in and out of focus, images mesmerize. By reinterpretation, one experiences a garden.

Workshop at Spannocchia, Tuscany, 2005

Two site-specific installations integrate Tuscany and the agricultural estate of Spannocchia, the landscape and its history, into artistic expression. Specifically, they address water and food as metaphors for life.

Riti d’Acqua presents modern-day bathroom fixtures installed in a waterless grotto. Two stones mark the entrance to this special space. 

This work speaks on several levels. First, it addresses water as a precious resource. Second, it references rituals of purification by water in specific spaces through the juxtaposition of grotto as sanctuary and the contemporary bathroom. Finally, it highlights the philosophy at Spannocchia to preserve the ancient through integration of old and new.

In Pilgrimage, two columns of snail shells migrate from the outdoors toward a plate filled with olive oil. As such, the procession is reminiscent of the parade of animals in the biblical story of Noah’s Ark. Unlike the animals, however, these shells are void of life and serve as metaphor of the mechanical, empty lives we can lead. What of the goal to which they—or we—migrate? Will the plate of oil enrich and flavor their lives or will the oil, by its nature, suffocate and consume them?


© 2016 Helga Felleisen

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