Stone

The well rounded stones from the river Iller, the artist Lioba Abrell uses for her work 100 X, are the result of natures activity. As vagabonds in a permanently changing riverbed they lost in years and decades their sharp edges as fragments. The continual power of nature had formed them, deformed or hurt. The artist takes up the energy of the nature and is going the laborious way of transformation from something given to something made. She constructs drill holes into the riverstones and because of that, she allows a view,witch is leading into the stones material and offers the secret interior. The holed stones make thoughts of chicken gods, witch you can find at the beaches of the East- and Northern Sea. Stones, with washed out chalk or fossil filling, are saving, in the belief of folklore, from the thread spinnig and blustering Kikimora, who is frighting the poultry as a ghost. Holes in a stone must irritate us human beings, however, stone is the symbol for resistance and longlife in contrary to the human fragile existence. May be, that the rationalization of the reconnaissance had superimposed the idea from geting lost ghosts. None the less, it is the vacancy in the stone, witch attracts attention. Because the artist does not, in the classical sculptural way, working a form out of the raw material, but shifts her sculptural working to the inside of the stone. With pearcing the stones and the careful removing of the material she is creating sculptures of "nothing", which became visible for the viewer only through their edges. The stones are witnesses in the river of the things, which defy persistant the waters, passing at them. The holes let the light into the stones and cause a ribbon, the shine of them, who knows. Kathrin Rost and Dr. Martin Scharvogel Translation: Ken Moseley