3. Juni 2012 - New Ceramics

PROFILE
above “The Meal“, porcelain,
glass, 9 x 40 x 14 cm,
2006
below “This is how I feel here“,
Installation, 15 glass jars
tion of the human body and with what it means to be a woman. And even if she initially made
vessels, this is by no means a contradiction, for ultimately the vessel is a metaphor for the human
body. Over more than three decades, she has largely left this metaphor behind her, turning
directly to the human image.
In a window niche in a room outside the exhibition space itself, at the Siegerlandmuseum,
she exhibited an installation that demonstrates her sense of place. Starting from the question
of what links the Siegerland and Wittgensteinerland regions – Renate Hahn there lives in Bad
Laasphe – she found the answer for herself: rivers that rise here, the Sieg on one side of the hills
and the Lahn on the other. Under a Plexiglas cover, there were four cuboid blocks of unfired clay,
one each in Sieg and Lahn clay, and two layered blocks consisting of the soils the artist had collected
on her journeys to various parts of the world. They were intended to
demonstrate her cosmopolitanism as well as her attachment to her roots.
The blocks were complemented with two open acrylic containers filled
with water from the springs of the Sieg and the Lahn. The memory of the
earth is summarised in concentrated form here. Renate Hahn is
fascinated by the layered earths with their various colours, consistencies
and structures. She thus manages to transform them
into uncommonly appealing unfired relief images.
“My working method always consisted of a
strange tension between keenest discipline
and constraint when I was learning new
techniques, and uninhibited experimentation,
when I had mastered the technique,
always tied to a theme.“
In the exhibition space proper, the walls are inhabited by
oversized, white, almost transparent porcelain figures along
the walls: a family with movable limbs. They make reference
to humankind's need to multiply, but at the same time they
pose the question of whether the reality of society still functions.
They are light and dance-like in their frozen movements, and very fragile.
For their appearance in the exhibition, Renate Hahn clothed them in tissue paper. In
this connection it is important to know that tissue paper contains a high proportion
16 NEW CERAMICS MAY / JunE 2012