Watersheds

For her presentation at Liste Basel this year, Christiane Blattmann has conceived a new family of works that explores the motif of the watershed. Watersheds (or drainage divides) are areas of land that guide runoff to a common low point. Varying widely in size, these geographical units ensure flow toward a central water body, their boundaries marked only by the divergence of watercourses.

Nature’s messy elements, however, are meant to stop at the façade of our homes—industrial drain pipes form an infrastructure that ensures a separation between dry interiors and the turbulent forces outside our built walls. In the sculptural works Dividers, these pipal systems are inverted: shown in interior space, as if the architecture had laid bare its own drainage network, exposing its innards. They are extended by textile objects resembling hooded jackets that, nestled between the pipes, seem to want to guide the direction of the circuit.

First of the rain pipe series, Blattmann’s Terminalia (2023) was originally shown in a sculpture park in Antwerp. It references the ancient Roman festival devoted to the god Terminus who presided over boundaries. In fetish rituals, the border stones between plots of land were adorned and worshipped as if they were sculptural representations.

For the sculpture Watersheds (Portrait of a Drain Pipe) (2024), the artist reproduced the pattern of her hooded (studio-)sweatshirt in canvas, and covered it in layers of jesmonite, enhancing every fold of the garment while attempting to imitate the form of downpipe structure, with its gutters and gorges. Not least, the form is also a play on the art historical term Schüsselfalten, a particular style of drapery in classical sculpture, bowl-like folds that tend to be deep and open upwards, as if they could hold liquids, often repeating in cascading rhythms. The sculpture’s final layer is executed in encaustic—traditionally, a painting technique that fuses beeswax and dammar resin to form a resistant compound.

Encausic is also employed in the painting series Unclosed, in which photocopies of window frames are conceived of as modular elements, arranged in an ever un-aligning way. The windows are unresolved, they linger like cold cases.