OOZE

The image of a little big girl floods the surrounding space in a bit listless way. The hands that grasp or let go are like moths trembling in the white light. Subtle but intense, sometimes nostalgic drawings depict characters often without a clear background. They stand outside the time and space, persistently acting more like fading memories. Often, there is something wistful about them, because of the source the artist draws from – be it photos of missing Latvian children (I miss you series) or the family archive, which captures irretrievably lost moments. Laimdota Malle herself says that she is interested in elements with missing information and subjective reconstruction of reality. Hence her fascination with photographs, the meaning and content which can be shaped in new ways, including work with casts of something from the past – like movement or bark. The theme of the installation named OOZE is not only disappearance and decay, memory and the past. It is primarily the effect of time and human imagination, as shown in untold stories, fantastic bluish color tones and some hard-to-identify objects. The imprint of a human present in Laimdota Malle’s work, although the man becomes emotional rather than a rational being, that is blending rather than ruling. The work raises questions about how we process and transform memories, how we deal with various life experiences and obstacles. Children, women and animals appear in this intimate, mysterious, hurtful world. Here, Malle allows a typical narrative to emerge from the gloomy scene: fairy-tale, dreamlike, irrational... In her own way, she responds to the current popularity of addressing the childhood or searching for alternatives in unfettered nature (after all, she previously hung one of her projects directly on trees in the forest). All of this puts OOZE within the contemporary artistic context, where “the others” and “those marginalized” are given more and more space, and environmental themes and efforts to abandon anthropocentric supremacy are more visible. Whether it is paraffin, gelatin or ordinary paper, the character of the chosen materials is essential for the tone of the entire installation. Parallelly, light, darkness and space also become materials for her. Together, they create the effects of levitating lightness or translucency, fragility and transience. Today, Laimdota Malle, like many others, returns to handwork and experiments with materials. In her works, however, she does not attempt to dominate the material and shape it according to preset ideas. Chance and the will of matter are allowed to intervene in the process, and in the form of the resulting artwork.