Sunhild Wollwage

Sunhild Wollwage is a trained laboratory technician and has been working as a freelance artist for many years. She is originally from Stuttgart, but has lived in Liechtenstein for over 50 years.

TEXT / Cornelia Kolb-Wieczorek

Sunhild Wollwage's work unfolds against the background of an intense encounter with nature and its cycles, forces and transformations. Thoughts about the clash between nature and civilisation are a central theme here, without making an explicit moral claim. Instead, her works represent techniques of remembering, of securing and recording traces of past life, of noting what is perceived between sensuality and spirit.

During her daily walks, Wollwage's attention is drawn to small-scale, inconspicuous natural material, which she encounters in seemingly chaotic abundance. She counters this natural chaos with a creative order by mounting the collected materials in serial sequence on an image carrier, resembling a laboratory-like experimental arrangement. The pictographs thus created in the interplay between clear order structure and intuitive-emotional impulse possess an idiosyncratic, sensitive poetry. They “write” the history of everything that is all too easily overlooked, tell of the mysteries of creation and of primeval mystical motifs of movement, without demystifying them through scientific explanation.

As soon as I set out for walks in nature, my thoughts immediately converge towards creative ideas.

Since around 2014, Wollwage has been creating panels of earth, pollen and soot, works with a delicate painting-like quality. Strips of different widths of the finest material collected over long periods of time are layered on top of each other in the manner of colour fields, like “memory layers”. Next to them are compositions of egg-shaped surfaces, which, like earlier works, incorporate the iconographic meaning of the egg as a symbol of life and purity. But it is not just about symbolism: as is always the case in Wollwage’s work, the material itself is in the foreground, the fleetingness and delicacy of the pollen, its yellow that seems to radiate from the past into eternity, this amorphous material that carries a form-giving spirit of life within it with quiet self-evidence. Then again, the magic of the different earths, the varying appeal of their glossy or matt appearance, their fine-toned colourfulness, the effect of a deep, dense black that combines with warm hues that one would like to attribute to Demeter, the goddess of the fertility of the soil, the seed and the grain.

Looking at the artist’s work, which has been created over decades with authentic consistency, it becomes clear that the factor of time plays an essential role: the past, present and future, the becoming and passing of all living things. This is clearly reflected in the time-consuming process of artistic creation itself, and also in the fragility of the chosen material, which is marked by its decay that will occur sooner or later.