Leonie Brandner
I make objects out of everyday materials, I stitch, I sing and I write. I am interested in material narratives, how things hold stories and how materials are tied up in narrative experience. I am invested in dreams and wishful thinking, as much as functionality and feeling like a necessary part of a system – in short I am interested in belonging, how I belong, how we belong, how things belong to a situation especially those that don’t seem to make any sense. Dealing with loss, inevitable changes, isolation and separation, life is an exercise of letting go, living with brokenness and trying to meet my surrounding not with defiance but generosity. We all belong together – the loss, the hurt, the joy, the humans, plants, animals, rocks and minerals. That is why I am invested in making ecosystems: installations in which the individual parts, objects, scents, texts, songs and video alike not only reference but depend on each other. My work is influenced by botany, feminist practices, by stories that are handed down from one generation to the next and a deep ecological concern for the care we return to our environment.
The materials and craft practices I deploy – pottery, stitching, cutting, gluing, assembling – reference domesticity and often gendered labour. I cherish the fragile, the delicate and tenderness as the vitality and determination of my practice. I work with textures, texture as stories, textures as something resonating in the hollow of the mouth, vibrating under the tips of fingers or as an aftertaste on tongues. And it is them, textures, that bring the various aspects of my work together in kaleidoscopical worlds on the edge of evaporation.