GATHERING 5 Warwick Street London
“But then, one has discovered the gateway to the environments, for everything a subject perceives belongs to its perception world [Merkwelt], and everything it produces, to its effect world [Wirkwelt]. These two worlds, of perception and production of effects, form one closed unit, the environment.”¹
When biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term Unwelt, he was examining the senses of various organisms: ticks, sea urchins, amoebae, jellyfish. Interested in how living beings perceived their environments, he argued that organisms experience life as subjects through their own reference frames, or, Umwelt. If, as Uexküll argued, every living creature inhabits a world of its own, any belief held in the existence of one and only one world, space and time for all living beings must be in doubt. Rather, we might open our minds to the immeasurable perceptual worlds in current existence, with each organism existing in its own sensory universe.
The objects on display in The Matrician are remnants of one of these such worlds. A brain, shoulderblade, heart, hipbone, nerve and cochlea exhibit the remains of an unknown species of creature that fell to Earth at an unknown time following the cataclysm of an alien meteorite. These fragments spread across our planet and hold the story of a life-form, the world they lived in constituted through their specific ways of perceiving their Umwelten.
One took on the form of a body built with wooden flesh, bones of stone and fungal tissue. Another has an existence entirely experienced through rhythmic functions in a body of rocks. Poems accompany the extraterrestrial organs, tracing their thoughts and revealing the life and demise of the creatures. Transcribed into human language, the poems reflect what little information we have on the mysterious nature of these entities, while also illuminating their final death scenes.
Sønderland’s watercolour counterparts to the fossilised remains allow us to speculate on these life-forms through our own narrative universe, our own Umwelt. The artist metabolises the cosmic and esoteric evolution of these entities into scenes vaguely familiar, yet unidentified: a figure on the brink of discovery in Nerve; a desolate landscape of Hoftebein, in which an unknown substance burns into trees like an opening into an abyss, or fire through flesh; Hjerte’s icy anthropomorphic forest with the haunting blue palette and evocative mood of Harald Sohlberg. Rendered delicately, the paintings offer a material history to the cosmic remnants on display.
By pairing the primordial artefacts with her paintings, Sønderland explores the porous and temporal layering of our supposed reality, subverting the objet trouvé into an act of cosmogenesis, where new worlds unfold through material transformation and uncharted imagination. At the core of Sønderland’s narrative is death and its cyclical nature; through mortality, we can explore the possibilities and different forms that life can take in the universe.
¹ Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 1934.
Photography by Ollie Hammick
