An exhibition dealing with artist run communities, large scale deep sea communication cables encountering curious sharks, Helena van Doeveren, the human touch and the exhibition Fiberglass Eels brings together a selection of recent works by Sam Hersbach. For this presentation, Hersbach has created an interrelated body of work in which deep-sea submarine communication cables recur alongside floral elements, human and non-human fantastical figures, drones (both those acquired by the Dutch government and consumer drones), and historical references that include portraits. Cultural spaces, such as meeting rooms of both institutions that provide art subsidies and of self-run artist initiatives, appear next to microbes, systems of measurement and scale, submarines colliding beneath the surface, and restless catfish.
The characters, narrative elements, and references in Hersbach’s works start at a material base. Recently, Hersbach has conducted research into creating his own pigments, which he has used in these paintings. Hersbach is interested in the emotional and associative qualities of pigment, and in how these are embedded in the materials. The pigments are derived from flowers that were given as a present, found or collected from overlooked environments, such as weeds growing between pavement tiles or plants like marram grass that help protect the dunes and land from rising sea levels. A series of sculptures made from stained glass function as carriers in which the plants can grow alongside their pigment-made counterparts, who have been transformed into an image frozen into painting.
FiberglassEelsembeds photographic elements and industrial materials, such as steel plates, into paintings to reveal the relationship between technology, nature and human systems in a layered manner, showing how they physically and ideologically nestle themselves in the world.
