If you’re considering bathroom renovations, I would perhaps advise against hiring Lisa Herfeldt to do the work.
Yes, it’s true, she’s something of a whiz with a silicone gun – creating compelling sculptures from this unlikely art material. But the more you look at her creations the more you realise that something is a little off. The thick lengths of sealant she produces stretch beyond the shelves on which they sit, sagging off the edges towards the floor. The knotty foam pipes bulge until they split. Some creations escape their acrylic glass box homes entirely, becoming a magnet for dust and hair. Let’s just say the Checkatrade reviews would not be pretty.
“I sometimes have the feeling that things are alive in a room,” says the German artist when we meet in Margate, where she is about to open her first UK solo show at Roland Ross gallery. “That’s why I came to use this foam material because it has this very bodily texture and feeling.”
Indeed there’s something rather body horror about Herfeldt’s work, from the phallic bulge that protrudes, hernia-like, from its cylindrical stand in the centre of the gallery, to the intestinal coils of foam that rupture like medical emergencies. On one wall Herfeldt has framed photocopies of the works viewed from different angles: they look like wormy parasites picked up on a microscope, or growths on a petri-dish. “It interests me that there are things in our bodies happening that also have their own life,” she says. “Things you can’t see or control.”
Talking of things she can’t control, the poster for the show features a photograph of the leaky ceiling in her own studio in Kreuzberg, Berlin – a brown, uneven stain on a square white panel. The building was built in the early 1970s and, she says, was instantly hated by local people because a lot of old buildings were torn down in order to make way for it. It was already in a state of disrepair when Herfeldt – who was born in Munich but grew up north of Hamburg before arriving in Berlin as a teenager – moved in.
This decrepit property was frustrating for the artist – she couldn’t hang her art works without fearing they might be damaged – but it was also fascinating. With no building plans available, nobody had a clue how to repair any of the issues that arose. When the ceiling panel in Herfeldt’s studio became so sodden it collapsed entirely, the only solution was to replace the panel with a new one – and so the cycle continued.
At another site on the property, Herfeldt says the leaking was so bad that a series of shower basins were installed in the suspended ceiling in order to redirect the water to a different sink. “I realised that the building was like a body, a totally dysfunctional body,” she says.
‘Things you can’t see or control’ … Lisa Herfeldt. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
The situation reminded her of Dark Star, John Carpenter’s debut 1974 film about an AI-powered spacecraft that takes on a life of its own. And as you might notice from the show’s title – Alice, Laurie & Ripley – that’s not the only film to have influenced Herfeldt’s show. The three names refer to the female protagonists in Friday 13th, Halloween and Alien respectively. Herfeldt cites a 1987 essay by the American professor Carol J Clover, which identifies these “final girls” as a unique film trope – women left alone to save the day. “She’s a bit tomboyish, on the silent side and she can survive because she’s quite clever,” says Herfeldt of the archetypal final girl. “They don’t take drugs or have sex. And it doesn’t matter the viewer’s gender, we can all identify with the final girl.”
Herfeldt sees a parallel between these characters and her sculptures – things that are just about holding in place despite the pressures they’re under. So is her work more about societal collapse than just leaky ceilings? Because like so many institutions, these materials that should seal and protect us from damage are actually slowly eroding around us. “Oh, totally,” says Herfeldt.
Before finding inspiration in the silicone gun, Herfeldt used other unusual materials. Recent shows have involved tongue-like shapes made from the kind of nylon fabric you might see on a sleeping bag or inside a jacket. Again there is the sense these strange items could come alive – some are concertinaed like caterpillars mid-crawl, others lollop down from walls or spill across doorways attracting dirt from footprints (Herfeldt encourages viewers to touch and dirty her art). Like the silicone sculptures, these nylon creations are also housed in – and escaping from – cheap looking acrylic glass boxes. They’re ugly looking things, and really that’s the point.
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“They have a certain aesthetic that somehow you feel very attracted to, and at the same time they’re very disgusting,” she says with a smile. “It tries to be not there, but it’s actually very present.”
Herfeldt is not making work to make you feel comfortable or aesthetically soothed. Instead, she wants you to feel uncomfortable, awkward, maybe even amused. But if you start to feel something wet dripping on your head as well, don’t say you haven’t been warned.
