Borgo Museo | Nuove Opere 2019 – 2021
* La Residenza d’Artista 2021 (seconda edizione) è un progetto a cura di CCT-SeeCity per la Pro Loco di Castagno, realizzato con il contributo della Fondazione Caript nell’ambito del bando Per la cultura #iorestoattivo 2021 e patrocinato dal Comune di Pistoia. Clicca qui per vedere foto e video.
Biography
Nina Ulrichs was born in Nuremberg in 1969. After graduating in fashion design in 1992, she turned to the visual arts and continued training and artistic studies until 1996 in Paris and Germany. She lives and works between Paris and her hometown in Germany. You have recently exhibited in group shows at MVVO New York in New York City, at the Paris Biennale and in London. In 2015 and 2016 she completed artist residencies in Chengdu, China and Paris. She was featured in Annuaire OFF and Artscene magazine in France. Her works deal with themes that revolve around the human being in space and nature and sentimental expressions. Her next works will be in Munich, Frankfurt and Paris. Her current projects turn out to be more involved in the urban and natural spaces that surround the places: “My passion is above all art. And in this artistic way I am still looking for our connections with nature today. Since I was a child I have grown fond of trees, plants, animals. I soon started harvesting wild plants for health and for eating. Nature always calms stress, which is important to me because I now live and work in big cities. Nature is one of my most important inspirations and every time I can go out into nature, not for sport or tourism, I go to the woods and forests to smell and savour nature again”.
Philosophy
“My art creates a language that shows the relationships between the intimate universe and the human body. My goal is to demonstrate the dual nature of our contemporary life through the expression of our fears, our joys, our emotions. At first glance these can be captured in beautiful images, but gradually our realities are revealed and the connections with contemporary events (war, destruction, human failures) are coming to mind. My work is based on the philosophy of a perpetual life cycle, characterised by an incessant appearance and disappearance”. Within her works, layers of faded traces of faded paintings, destroyed collages, transparent canvases or paper are used. The lightness of these materials fits perfectly with his constant search for light and depth. The search for balance in the composition is another very important aspect, as is the open structure of the installations, where no frame appears to create boundaries. Recently in some photographic works of him some lines are appearing, red and black, abstract or half figurative. These lines represent directions and horizons. Free to be interpreted in everyone’s mind and to suggest directions from the past and for the future: “These lines are open and seem to come out of the frame, looking for new ways, like maps that only we can see, as we make our way into the unknown territory of our own illumination”.
Artwork in Castagno
Castagno is the first artist residency carried out by Nina Urlichs in Italy. Here she created two works: a permanent artwork, the Listening for the rising sap of trees sculpture, nearby the train Station, and some prints part of a series entitled Imbued with trees, an ongoing project on the which she has been working internationally and long-term since 2020.
Starting from his second work which is not in Castagno but which the artist will exhibit in the future, we can tell that the three mono-prints (monotypes) produced here are part of a collection of prints made on tree bark in forests or city parks in different countries, such as Germany and Morocco. The intention or rather the need is to re-connect humanity to nature: “It is my way of showing people that protecting trees and nature is important for all the people of the world. Since the dawn of time, man has had a close relationship with trees and forests. A truly cosmological relationship. In many cultures the tree is respected, revered and sometimes even consulted. Some artists like me have maintained a strong bond with this intimacy with trees and there is an ever stronger and more necessary creative return to nature. However, our relationship with trees is ambiguous. Trees are seen more as objects of profit, amenity or glitz. They are little respected as an organic and living entity. Trees are domesticated in gardens, placed in plastic or miniature pots”. However, for artist, humans created the still need to reconnect with nature. This need is becoming an increasingly evident global phenomenon, expressed through art or other manifestations. Numerous cultural and scientific projects around forests are emerging and are unfortunately in symbiosis with the progressive destruction of nature. After her work with body expressions, Nina Urlichs felt the need to reconnect with nature, forests and trees, integrating them into her art. This project is therefore a collaborative experiment between art and nature where the artist considers trees as living beings: she takes their unique fingerprints using the monoprinting technique on their bark, files them, names and memorizes them. These prints, made on papers of various sizes, represent the tree, the sensuality of its skin and the relationship with its space. On these monotypes, later reworked by the artist, the tree chosen as a symbol of a territory appears sculpted through the imagination in its relationship with mysticism and death. The project will then be accompanied by short documentaries and interviews with local people, testimonies of their relationship with the land and nature they live in, and the ecological problems that all share: “The tree appears to me today as a link between two lines of Ariadne through my works. This is a long-term adventure of a cycle that begins in my work, reconnecting to my roots. This sentimental connection between people and forests has become a priority in my pictorial and psychological research. This project is international and I would like to expand it more and more. You want me to make these prints and video interviews in different countries, and different forests, creating a connection between people all over the world, like roots under the earth… a project in drawing and video, renewed lines”. The tree chosen in Chestnut for this international project is – of course – a beautiful chestnut tree which is located near the station, not far from the other chestnut tree chosen for its permanent installation.
Inside this second chestnut tree, selected for its particular shape and cavity, divided in half by a dead part and still alive on the other, Nina has inserted a two-dimensional metal sculpture that she had already made before coming to Castagno and which he then brought with him from Paris: “This sculpture is the silhouette of a little girl, standing near a tree and listening inside the rising sap”. The human figure listening to the tree is a little girl who, from the artist’s point of view, like all children, represents curiosity. The metal sculpture, positioned on the dead side of the tree trunk, as if to give new life to nature through art, was then decorated with natural materials and elements (branches, leaves, small pine cones) collected in the surrounding woods together with some little girls of the village: in the artist’s idea, resident or every visitor, perhaps walking along the paths of the woods or perhaps arriving or departing from the Chestnut Station, will be able to contribute and enrich the work by adding something to it in a collective work and continuous listening with nature.