Gam Bodenhausen

Scale is a matter of the imagination. The cliffs that inspire Gam Bodenhausen’s monumental drawings would dwarf the wall-covering works to the size of a snowflake. But when she translates those same drawings into substantially smaller ceramic pieces, the imposing cliffs with their vertiginous walls reappear. Except now, they have been reduced to a sliver of rock, pliable like paper, waving in a watery fashion, a staggeringly precarious constellation that, paradoxically, allows the work to stand upright unaided. In a second series of work, Bodenhausen shaped mounds with a vertical slice missing in the middle – as if she aimed a galactic laser beam at a mountain to carve a cleft straight through it to reduce travelling time. More abstractly: the artist explored relations of planes to volumes and, inadvertently, of humans to the world. At the same time, the works with their poetic, sensitive surfaces are simply beautiful objects.