ARTIST STATEMENT
Just as one can never return to the same time and place, so too are time and place never quite the same again. This is the central theme that permeates my body of work, which continually returns to questions of memory, geography, and migration, approached with poetic intuition. My work is at the creative interplay between the acts of disruption and encounter, leading to an understanding of place-making and recollection as creative and endlessly open processes. The very idea of place and time becomes a living, breathing, and ever-shifting presence. I seek to honor the subjective, fluid, and organic nature of memory.
My work seeks not to document but to feel—recollecting and reconstructing family stories almost as though translating the work of an oral historian into a visual and tactile experience. In this series, I transform vintage maps of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, dating from the 1920s to the 1970s, to reveal the complex interplay of permanence and memory. Cutting out the maps and sewing on them, creates new landscapes where land hovers like an organic tapestry woven out of both life and loss. Challenging the scientific objectivism of maps, this series reveals the fragmentation of place through the permeating contexts of migration and the tactile experience of memory.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Middelmann is a multimedia artist known for using found objects, family artifacts, and light or airx sketches on gauzy canvases and skin-like surfaces to explore the question of memory. Her work and process have been shown in over 90 solo and group shows, museums, galleries and art fairs in Europe, USA, and Switzerland. Her art is featured in public and major private collections in Switzerland, Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan and the USA. She has shown at the Regionale 23 in Germany, the Westbeth Art Center in New York, The Lorrach art museum in Germany, the Palazzo Ziino contemporary art museum in Palermo Italy, and the Museu del Donna in Spain. She is a reciepient of three Swiss government artist grants.
Born in Switzerland to American and German parents, she moved to the USA when she was 16, where she received a Bachelor degree in International Relations and Creative Writing from the Johns Hopkins University. There she received a full scholarship for “outstanding academic acheivement.” After college, she worked in publishing for seven years in New York. She then returned to Switzerland and got her postgraduate degree in the visual arts from the Basel art school (Switzerland). She currently lives and works in Switzerland and travels frequently to the USA. She is represented in Switzerland by the Gallery Jasmin Glaab, who features work from emerging and renowned women artists such as Tracy Emin.
© Naomi Middelmann