STRAY
Kamilla Sajetz Mathisen
In a footnote to The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), JG Ballard writes:
“Most of the machines that surround our lives – airliners, refrigerators, cars and typewriters - have streamlined their way into our affections. Now and then, as in the case of the helicopter, with its unstable, insect-like obsessiveness, we can see clearly the deep hostility of the mineral world. We are lucky that the organic realm reached the foot of the evolutionary ladder before the inorganic.”
Some of these reflections resonate in Kamilla S. Mathisen’s sculptures and installations. However, it is not the difference between the organic and the inorganic that leads to this suggestion, even though the mythical relationship between clay and life always lurks in the background when ceramics take anatomical shapes. Mathisen’s sculptures are thoroughly organic, with their delicate network of veins under a fragile layer of skin, covering a clearly visible bone structure. They do not express a fascination for the sci-fi genres “man vs. machine”, and they do not say anything about the “deep hostility” of the mineral world.
There is still something undeniably chilling about these creatures, the way they twist and crawl like incarnated nightmares. The immediate disgust they evoke is not unlike the one Ballard summons in his description of the helicopter and its “unstable, insect-like obsessiveness”. However the unease does not consist in what Masahiro Mori refers to as ‘The Uncanny Valley Effect’ - the idea that what is non-human appears increasingly revolting the closer it comes to natural human likeness. In spite of their geriatric skin texture and newborn blindness, it is not their closeness to humanity that makes them revolting. We are not in ‘Uncanny Valley’.
We are rather in Olduvai Valley, East Africa, in a reality where the proto-human did not manage to pick up a rock to crush animal bones in search of marrow, a rich source of protein that could have increased its intellectual capacity, thus making it able to build civilizations. Instead it gave up and died, without leaving any traces but a few fossils, which no future civilizations would study with wonder. Mathisen’s sculptures do not suggest a world after humanity has become extinct, further evolved or surpassed, as envisioned by countless post-apocalyptic dystopias, but rather a world where man never existed. It is not the possibility of the existence of these creatures that is chilling, rather the insight that our own non-existence is equally possible. It is the naked, blind, haphazard and twisted logic of evolution that disturbs us in our meeting with these creations, and it is within this arbitrary universe, which is our own, that the resonance becomes apparent: We are lucky.
Joakim Stegen Tischendorf, 2014