Lemm&Barkey is a project by Lot Lemm and Grace Ellen Barkey. The artists use delicate materials: porcelain, fabric and yarn, to create almost hysterical forms that burst the seams of the materials’ subtlety. 18 Videos present some surprising lifesize gures intriguing in their voluptuousness, absurd shapes, and dynamics of disappearing and remerging.
LEMM&BARKEY
In 2004, Grace Ellen Barkey and Lot Lemm set up Lemm&Barkey to give shape to their close artistic cooperation: they work on the concept, set and costumes for Barkey's creations, and create art installations. Grace Ellen Barkey's stage productions are sequences of images that attempt to be autonomous. Lemm&Barkey's visual artwork is an in-between stage in the archiving of these autonomous images. An in-between stage because Barkey never wants to achieve her aim. She is not interested in solutions, but in the problem itself.
Their visual work has been exhibited at museums including BOZAR (Brussels), Benaki Museum (Athens), Musée des Arts décoratifs (Paris), CC Strombeek, Museum Dr. Guislain (Ghent), Triënnale Hasselt / Superbodies i.a. Their film The Porcelain Project | Installation (2007) was selected for the Festival International du Film sur l'argile et le verre (FIFAV) in Montpellier. In 2013, Lemm&Barkey made Odd? But true!, a wordless dance performance for all ages, opening up their work to a young audience.
An insane world of majestic rulers in regal underwear and paper headdresses, voluptuous princesses with porcelain busts and radiant crinolines, and colourful, handmade animals that carry out human actions. Astonishing life-size figures that intrigue with their sensuality and absurd shapes, and with the dynamics of how they appear and disappear again.
The works of Lemm&Barkey are permeated with questions of material. The use of crafts, of porcelain and knitting and crochet, is an important element. The materials that pass through the artists' hands are their 'partners in crime,' treated in an almost hysterical manner and made into something monumental and absurd. What could be more pointless than a teacup from which no tea can be drunk? Why is a bra in porcelain unbearable? What will happen when the seams burst? Will the material form a bigger story? And is the painstakingly crocheted bear a children's story or a transgressive dream?
But then Lemm&Barkey set the bodies of performers counter to these ideas. Trained works of perfection, utterly fragile and obstinate, these bodies are the vehicle of a primal force. Just as in Barkey's stage productions, it is never all about choreography as such, but about its disappearance; in 18 Videos, it is never a matter of the representation, but of the presentation itself. This installation is the result of a non-preconceived aim. An anti-conceptual delusion.