Petals, bloom!

In her online solo show Petals, bloom!, Klara Kayser is showing a series of still life photographs from 2016 juxtaposed with her recent large-scale spring poetry.
The ceramic loaves and slices of bread seen in the still life photographs were moulded, glazed and fired by the artist. A drop or a stream of a commercial glaze that is reminiscent of mould somehow covers each piece. The name of the German glaze is: Morgentau (morning dew).
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Each piece therefore shows the dynamic process of decay and freezes it into a static eternal object. By showing photographs and not objects, the final image becomes no more than an echo of a still life. The irony remains that even though photography is able to capture time, the mouldy-bread-objects are, in themselves, a still life of a process: The objects have never existed without decay; the mould will never spread nor eat the form of the object.

The Spring poetry series was developed and curated by Klara Kayser explicitly for this exhibition in direct response to her BREAD series.  The use of text as material is a recurring theme in the artist’s practice. The short and hopeful Spring poems could be reminiscent of haiku structures but are completely independent and detached from any poetic genre.

The confrontation between the still lifes portraying decay and the encouraging and vital spring poems is by no means a contradiction. The objects and the texts both portray a living substance - a dynamic process captured and immortalized in either a sculpture or a poem.