Uta Neumann

Stones are mountains en minature - memories of great landscapes. They have stored the stories of our earth - as echoes of past times, they are the manifestation of the mountain nymph herself. Stones have always had a great effect on us humans: stone circles are just one testimony to this.
With their seemingly infinite duration they confront us with our own finiteness. Their multifaceted with crystalline inclusions and vivid colors fill me again and again with great astonishment.

Like an echo between high, massive mountains, where the vibrations of sound bounce off, repeat themselves and recompose themselves again and again in a changing and unique sound structure, we encounter the qualities of mountains and stones in this visual echo. In their scope and depth, their age and roughness, their history, patience and majesty, they convey to us: we are here, together with you, we caress you with our days, years, centuries.

For my exploration of the theme of echo, I have created the installation "The Echo of Stones". On three overhead-projectors arranged one above the other are 30 clay sculptures from the series "The Skin of Stones" can be seen. These, spread over the
projector’s surface, create a united shadow image on the wall.

The clay impressions come from stones borrowed from a small river above the Largo Maggiore on the Swiss side. These clay impressions reveal the skin of the stones, showing their delicate textures, tiny cracks and unevenness and are dusted with their mica. Like the imprint left on the ground by a stone after it has lain in one place for a long time and been picked up, these clay sculptures reflect the stones from the river and their imprint on the riverbed.

When the clay sculptures are projected, the shadows overlap on the wall. In the process the structures of the stones experience a range of gradual shadings between condensation and dissolution. A temporal circuit creates a choreography of the shadows on the wall, which in different phases sometimes overlap and then separate again. As if the echo of the stones dissolves and reassembles. The visibility of the individual
stages of transformation, in which the matter of the stone imprints meets the light and dissolves again, translates the
dissolves again, translates the fanning out of sound tones into diaphanous image layers of the echoes: the echo of the stone from sound resounds in turn as an echo in forms of light and shadow on the wall.

Supported by VG-Bild Kunst & Stiftung Kunstfonds – Kultur Neustart