Mariele Neudecker: Sediment

Mariele Neudecker is a German-born, Bristol-based artist working at the crossover of art and science. Her multimedia practice, which incorporates sculpture, video, painting, and sound, explores the processes and effects of perception, the complexities and contradictions of landscapes and visuality, and the politics of representation and territorialization. The influence of the nineteenth-century German romantic sublime is interwoven alongside inspiration from Neudecker’s work with scientists, as a guest artist on the Arts at CERN program, her trips to the Arctic and travel elsewhere.

This major monograph, published following an exhibition of the same name at Limerick City Gallery of Art – Neudecker’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Ireland – presents more than 200 works from a 35-year-long career. In addition to a foreword by Úna McCarthy, the gallery’s Director and Curator, essays by distinguished academics and curators from across the fields of art and science address diverse areas of Neudecker’s practice. A ‘timeline’ that Neudecker made specially for 'SEDIMENT' concludes the publication.

Greer Crawley, an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Drama, Theatre, and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London, considers Neudecker’s archive, studio, and her working processes, while Ariane Koek, an international expert in the field of arts, science, and technology, suggests that the contemporary sublime Neudecker is so often described as seeking is, for her, the very process of perception itself. Her comprehensive introduction to Neudecker’s practice also discusses the tank works, for which the artist is best known, in which fiberglass landscapes are suspended in chemical solutions.

James Peto, from the Wellcome Collection, London, focuses on issues of representation, post-colonialism, and ‘time’, while Alice Sharp, Artistic Director of Invisible Dust, looks at Neudecker’s work and collaborations concerning the deep sea.

Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, returns to questions of territorialization in and around the Arctic, and Professor Kerstin Mey, Interim President of the University of Limerick, considers the genre of still life in Neudecker’s photographic series ‘Plastic Vanitas’ (2015).

Dominic Gray, Projects Director at Opera North, offers insight into Neudecker’s work with sound and music, addressing issues of performance, translation, and scale; while Pontus Kyander, an independent writer and curator based in Helsinki, returns to the motif of the forest, arguing that any reading of Neudecker’s work might be taken beyond an interest in landscape and the sublime to incorporate contemporary ecological questions. Finally, Crawley’s second offering returns to Neudecker’s use of sound – its juxtaposition and superimposition, alongside the notion of the window as a device, considering how each creates ‘temporal turbulences’ and ‘an entanglement of materiality, space, form and position,’ foregrounding the artist’s desire for viewers to see everything as eternally in flux.

The publication, which is released to coincide with a new iteration of Neudecker’s exhibition ‘SEDIMENT’ at Hestercombe, Somerset, in summer/fall 2021, has been edited by Greer Crawley, designed by Herman Lelie and Stefania Bonelli, and printed by EBS Verona. It is published by Anomie Publishing, London.

Mariele Neudecker is a German-born artist living and working in Bristol, UK. She undertook a BA at Goldsmiths College and an MA at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and she is now a Professor of Fine Art at Bath School of Art. Using mediums including sculpture, video, painting, and sound, her practice investigates the relationship of art and science and how we construct natural and technological worlds within a contemporary sublime today.

Neudecker has shown widely in international solo and group exhibitions. She is on the Arts at CERN’s guest program, the European Commission’s JRC SciArt advisory panel, and the steering committee of Centre of Gravity, UK. She works with Pedro Cera, Lisbon; In Camera Gallery, Paris; and Thomas Rehbein Galerie, Cologne.

Greer Crawley is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Drama, Theatre, and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is an Associate of the Museums Association, Director and journal Editor for the Society of British Theatre Designers. Curator ‘Traces of the Future’ Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, London, 2017.

Úna McCarthy has been the Director and Curator of Limerick City Gallery of Art since 2015 and curated Mariele Neudecker’s exhibition, ‘SEDIMENT’. She regularly contributes to the University of Limerick World Academy lecture series and played an active role in Limerick’s bid for designation as European City of Culture 2020.

Ariane Koek is an acknowledged international expert and pioneer in the field of arts, science, and technology. She is also a well-known writer and curator in the field. Koek initiated, designed, and directed the acclaimed Arts at CERN programme 2009–15 and is strategic advisor and producer to many international initiatives worldwide.

Professor Kerstin Mey is currently serving as the Interim President of University of Limerick. Mey’s research is concerned with contemporary and twentieth-century visual art, with a special interest in sculpture, art in public and public pedagogies, art as research, and the relationship between creative practice, documentation, and archives.