Slice of one another is a silent moment. A scene in the gap where something has already happened and something else is about to continue. With apathy, I have dissected my repetitive forms. Like a restart where I took it apart to find new ways to glue it back together.
A Sami family history, marked by shame, has sneaked its way into the work. But the lack of nuance in the stories like these, dulls me and leaves me wanting something more.
Each new sculpture is a desire to knead more layers.
The sculptures are fragments of something that once was, but also an attempt to understand what comes next. How do you relate to your history in the present?
There is a before but also an after.
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Erika Stöckel work with ceramics. With the clay, she makes sculptures that resemble the body – folds and openings. Each sculpture becomes its own individual and together they form a family. Where the individual object is irrelevant, together they create a narrative.
Stöckel is interested in the external gaze, power structures and how these are manifested in the body. The results of colonialism and exotification. But not the result as in texts and photographs, but rather the feeling it leaves, what is not written down in a document – shame and guilt. How a story can settle in the body and be carried on through generations.
Stöckel is born 1989 in Kiruna and holds a BFA from Umeå School of Art and a MFA from Oslo School of Art. She lives and works in Oslo.
Hendrik Zeitler