Deborah Schamoni

Nicole Wermers’ Dishwashing Sculptures are latently instable piles of crockery, glasses and kitchen utensils arranged in modified dish- washer baskets and then set on standardised white plinths. A simple, everyday activity is turned into a sculptural act; positive and negative forms are wedged together, piled up, jammed into each other, and presented at eye level. Arrang- ing crockery to dry after washing the dishes is transformed into a formal composition of anti- que porcelain, exquisite design, cheap ceramics, and eccentric kitchen utensils. The choice of ele- ments is led by statics as well as the aesthetic. At the same time, the Dishwashing Sculptures combine male concepts of architecture and construction with connotations of housework and the domestic sphere: the tectonic-sculp tural meets materialised forms of female, repro- ductive work.

Nicole Wermers is interested in forms of display ineveryday life, in the way that functional elements adopt an ornamental form, and role models inscribe themselves into objects. In her works, she emphasises decorative aspects by stripping things of their utility value, exposing the genealogy of design, and focusing on the sculptural in the profane. Her works play with syntax, semantics and materiality suggestively, thus accentuating the shape of those gestures attached to things. Although our everyday acti- vities using the object have been suspended and the design is now mere ornament, the trig- gered connotations remain.

Social structures are reflected in the disparate, finely balanced elements of the Dishwashing Sculptures, evident in their differentiation bet- ween utilitarian form and decor. Concepts such as class, taste and identity adhere, virtually, to the sculpturally displayed objects and their design, just as interior design as a whole has been turned into a staged showcase of the self. At the same time, the dishes are so carefully balanced that each object supports the others. It is a display that exhibits but also presents itself as a gesture of supportiveness: a being-there- for-others that brings out the complexity of its seemingly obvious structure.

Text: Vanessa Joan Müller
Curated by Vanessa Joan Müller