07.12.20 - ARTIST INSPIRATION - Anselm Kiefer

During this morning's lecture we looked at various artists dealing with conflict and remembrance, and Anselm Kiefer's work really stood out to me and gave me ideas for my project. Since I am wanting to represent a post-human world in my power project, I have thought about what we will leave behind after we are gone - buildings, plastic, trash, clothes - forming a layer of waste on the surface of the earth, coined the 'anthroposphere'. Kiefer's sculptures give me this exact empty, ghostly feeling. His metal, concrete and fabric creations look like decaying ruins of an extinct race, where we are left to wonder what went wrong.

My ideas so far involve mutated hybrid creatures - spawn of a nuclear apocalypse - crawling over a dystopian, derelict wasteland. The garments hanging from the spiral staircase in this image look completely ruined; they are dusty, torn, stained and disfigured. There is no human presence left and I find this sense of loss and disillusionment really powerful. The way that they are displayed on the rusty spiralling staircase perhaps represents an uncontrolled descent, or mirrors the shape of DNA as if the artist is saying that this is what humans are made of, and death and destruction is an integral part of it.

These artworks have reinforced my ideas about using materials like fabric and plaster as well as discarded waste such as scrap metal, old machine parts and cables, because now I can see what effects can be created and what messages they convey.












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