Tine Bech
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Boundless in Space [60Kb] |
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Felt Sphere [48Kb] |
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Floating Field [40Kb] |
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Sea Creature [44Kb] |
Artist's Statement
Written by Tracey Warr
Tine Bech's work consists of sculpture, drawings, installations and sound. She uses a hybrid of biology and materials in order to evoke images of formlessness on the edge of form. Through an exploration of materials and materiality Bech addresses the body's languageless experience of the world. The approach is not logocentric. She addresses the gap between sensuous, bodily experience and its interpretation in words and categories.
The body is everywhere suggested and evoked in Bech's work, and in some of her 'action drawings' she has literally used her own body as a tool - jumping on charcoal to make drawings. But her drawings are also inspired by the forces of nature and by events in the cosmos - by black holes, images of galaxies, landscapes seen from space and rainfall. In 'Spacehole' we are flung into a macrocosmic void, a black hole. Bech gestures at both the miniscule world of the microbe and the vast world of the cosmos.
Bech often presents us with disturbing, disorientating views of something familiar. Is 'Space Pussy' for instance derived from an eye, a vagina or neither? These are mysterious objects and images. We feel that we should know what they are but they elude our categorisation, sliding past our full recognition. There is a visceral trace in her work, as Francis Bacon put it describing his own work, there is something 'leaving a trail of the human presence and memory... as the snail leaves its slime'. She renders the familiar unfamiliar so we are no longer sure what landscape we are looking at. This is a strategy akin to Surrealist photographs by Brassai or Bouffard and the exploration of fetishistic close-ups by Bataille and Eisenstein.
Bech's textured sculptures frequently seem organic or uncannily alive: 'Fnug' with its expressive open mouth, or 'Boundless in Space', sprouting and shedding duplicate smaller versions of itself in an amoeba-like reproductive process. Her drawing of a 'Sea Creature' looks like a cross between a flesh-eating plant and an exotic insect and her sculpture, 'Tumbleweed' could be a nest or a container for an unseen life-form.
Her tactile materials are reminders of physicality - we want to touch her objects, we need to walk around them, to experience them, to meet them and they interact with us, responding to our proximity.
Tracey Warr is a curator and writer based in England. She is the editor of 'The Artist's Body' (Phaidon, London, 2000). She teaches at Dartington College of Arts.
Biography
Tine Bech was born in Denmark and studied for her BA at Aarhus Kunstskole. She moved to London in 1997 and studied her MA in sculpture at Surrey Institute of Art & Design University College. She has exhibited her work in Denmark, Moscow, Berlin and London. Some of the galleries where she has shown include RBS Gallery London, L Gallery Moscow, and Aarhus Kunstbygning. She has collaborated with different scientists and often works with Sam Woolf (PhD) from The Blip, creating interactive artwork. Her exhibition Puls in Denmark, was supported by Kulturpuljen and reviewed in Dansk Kunst in 2003. She was awarded a RBS Bursary (Royal British Society of Sculptures) in 2004.
Contact Details
Tine Bech
E: mail@tinebech.com