Chiara Valci Mazzara

A Garden

Selina Baumann’s works construct A Garden, a realm populated by ceramic volumes: plastic shapes, organic, ancestral forms. The sculptures are occupying the space as bodies of vibrant matter, porous ceramic, glazed continuum of one single unit of moulded material.

Baumann’s pieces move being steady, inhabit, pose questions by relating to atavistic conformations; perceived as characters, each one of them is an individual transient carrier of meta meanings through which, a response from the viewer, a reaction, is initiated.

The sculptures – being liminal to the biological and the matter – are all strong figures, an abstract group, united in some way by a primitive yet organic, impelling, redemptive quest for our senses to be triggered, for the ancestral shapes to awake perceptions through an arcane signifier.

The enclosed yet unbarred landscape, this garden, permits to come closer, walk through, wonder and wander. Each and every piece develops towards vertical and side perspectives, causing an alternate yet cogent perception of the forms. Those forms developed by the artist through a single un-interrupted movement, an instinctual gesture, seem to conquer the clay, as vessels to elicit responses as echoes.

The works seem to occur as a consequence of their own transformation, challenging their  own interpretation: here, the ephemeral meets the phenomenon, the matter. The elongated shapes  assert some perpetual renewal, a continuous change.. they evoke lust, sensuality, tactile hunger.

Baumann’s pieces convey atavistic resemblances, stand as totemic figures, posing as archaic shapes, lightning formed symbols, knots, crosses, spirals, protracted bodies. The raw or glazed matter permits the gesture of the artist to be seen, there’s no separation – observing the sculptures – between the finished piece and the process of its forming: it is a doubled infinity of meanings, of references and of coordinates all equally possible, all in the eyes of the viewer.

Chiara Valci Mazzara