From aquatic to terrestrial, Filterfeeders were presented during the summer in the exhibition Utopia/Dystopia, with the five Filterfeeders placed in the pond. They will now be shown on land in the Art Gallery, where visitors can come closer and experience the sculptures’ complex nature and composition — something that could only be observed from a distance when they stood in the pond spraying water.
The work takes its starting point in radiolarians, filter-feeding plankton, and processors. What they have in common is that they are made of quartz and that their function is to filter energy. Plankton filter energy in the form of nutrients, while processors filter digital information.
The meeting point between plankton, processors, and us humans is that we also filter both nutrients and information — information as nourishment for knowledge and opinions. Unlike plankton and processors, however, we are not specialised in filtering the vast amount of information we are exposed to, which in turn affects our lives.
The work consists of materials that also contain quartz. Glass is largely made from sand, which in turn largely consists of quartz. The same applies to clay, which through glaze once again approaches glass. The glaze in turn contains copper, which conducts electricity in processors.
Each piece in the series, which consists of five parts, has taken its form from Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of radiolarians, fragments of quartz, and an element drawn from myth, popular culture, and biology — each carrying a hint of trickery: the jester’s collar, a siren, a hulder, an atlas moth, and Gizmo’s finger which, in the pond, touched the water’s surface.
They were placed in the pond, as they are now in the Art Gallery, in the same relative positions as the great garbage gyres in the oceans appear on the world map, and in the pond the water was filtered through each part.
