S  Ø  R  E  N

Annealing

Artist Statement:

Annealing began with the idea that pressure does not always destroy a material. Sometimes it changes its structure.

At the center of the installation is a woman caught in the act of falling. Her body moves backward and downward, but she is still trying to hold on. I am interested in that particular moment, the space between losing your footing and surrendering to the fall.

Behind her, a large distressed cloth scroll carries another kind of record. It is drawn, stained, torn, marked, and worked over. Figures emerge and disappear across its surface as though the cloth has been recording what happened to it.

The body and the scroll hold the same history differently. One carries it physically. The other records its trace.

Copper appears only in fragments. For me, it is not decoration. It is evidence of heat and change.

Annealing is not really about returning to what existed before. It is about what remains after pressure has changed the material, and what that altered thing is capable of becoming.

Installation:

Annealing centers on two elements installed in relationship to each other: a suspended figurative sculpture and a large drop-cloth scroll behind it. Together they compress the body, the drawn surface, and the architecture of the Tiny Gallery into a single scene.

The figure is female, suspended in a backward and downward trajectory. Her position is unstable. She appears caught mid-fall while still trying to hold on, held in the space as a body under pressure. Her surface is dark, earthen, and fire-touched, with deep umber and charcoal, subtle warmth, fragmentation, and distressed cloth worked into the form.

Behind her, a floor-reaching scroll of distressed drop cloth carries a drawn, accumulated record. Figurative body, broken contours, stains, ink, washes, abrasion, tears, and exposed cloth all stay visible, so the history of the material remains part of the image. It is meant to feel like a record of a life or event that has been carried, damaged, altered, and preserved.

Copper appears sparingly, at points of tension, stitching, and attachment. It is a trace of heat, stress, repair, and transformation.

Biography:

Soren is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, drawing, and mixed media. The practice pulls together figurative forms, distressed cloth, altered surfaces, found materials, and restrained metal, rooted in questions about memory, endurance, and the physical traces left by pressure and change.

Drawing, sculpture, and material process often share the same work. Surfaces get stained, torn, abraded, and built up, and much of that history stays visible in the finished piece.

Contact this artist via website sorenstudio.art or instagram at @soren.practice