Aufgepfropft
Artist in Lab
To collaborate with totally different partners, to collect impressions and knowledge outside ones’ own discipline, to venture into the unknown, to salvage the possible and unexpected in the frontier regions, this approach is characteristic for the mostly conceptual work of Marie-Luise Meyer. Her work „Aufgepfropft“ labours at the interface between art and science. As “Artist in Lab” grant recipient from the Kunststiftung Sachsen-Anhalt she spent three months in 2007 at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben. A walk through the freezers of the gene-bank, where endless rows of glass jars with thousands of plant samples are stacked up, the extensive herbarium as well as the seed and fruit collection, and most of all a look through the microscope enable the artist to immerse herself into a surreal world of shapes, structures and colours. Is there anything that nature has not already conceived? Using her own research tools, Marie-Luise Meyer starts where nature and science meet their limits and creates a phantastimatic biotope way beyond visible reality.
The laboratory bench of the artist resembles a dissection table. Plants are disassembled into their basic shapes, cut up and examined in detail. Ordered according to shape and ornamental structure, biomorphic modules present themselves as the building blocks for newly assembled hybrid objects. Overflowing order: the experimental setup invokes partly a 17th century still life, a biological schematic diagram and then again a plant model. But nothing seems to fit a clear scheme. Everything appears to be in metamorphosis. The nutrient solution in the petri-dishes glistens like iridescent primeval slime for the creation of utopias. Stamens and pistils contort on the plates like wiggly worms. Strange fruits and seeds are not far from entering another form of being and leafs of swirling shapes explore the territory. Pollen pile up to sticky coloured heaps as if they were sweets, mutant cultures explode like popcorn, next to them pistils in the size of femurs. Away from the carousel a pipette turns into a vegetable-like object and even the sink contorts like an amoeba. In the middle, magnificent yet foreign, there is an incomplete blossoming plant in longitudinal section. As in the carefree days of childhood Marie-Luise Meyer has built a tower – without having to consider the possibility if its collapse – anything is possible: a beautiful as much as frightening dream for any artist or scientist.
Susanne Längle, Wien 2008