Children making waves
A waterline cutting through the space,
from wall to wall, and consisting in a frieze
of hundreds of photographs from children’s drawings .
Dimensions variable, with photographs
18 x 12 cm each, under plexiglas. 2022
The photographs that make up Children Making Waves as a singular work (not a series), are “portraits” capturing instances of waves while sifting through hundreds of drawings by schoolchildren. Collectively, they bear something of the school photograph, that old exercise in conformity (here seen in the convention of the sideway wave, moving from left to right), while each individual mien reveals a personality of one’s own.
All these photographs are joined to form a single frieze, matching the waterline from one image to the next, and presenting a slighly erratic, accidented horizontal line – a line then presented stretching from wall to wall throughout the space as if indicative of rising water-levels.
In the exhibition of the same name (Zürich, 2022), it was exhibited alongside a group of cornupcopias, where the rippling horizontality of the waves was a direct threat to the precarious vertical stackings of concrete elements. A conflict between flow and accumulation which will ring as both generational as ecological.
With warmest thanks to the children of Schule Altstetterstrasse, Zurich
