Artist Statement                                                                      

In my works I want to question everyday occurrences, the patterns and images in which we live and wich we create. I want to work and play with our boundaries. Those boundaries which we create ourselves and the boundaries created by our thoughts, which then determine our actions. In doing so I create seemingly normal elements or places within our familiar environment, which at second glance, are incongruous and strangely detached. I want to use these free space to create new ones. I wish to transplant an idea from one place to another.

This is why I work with inconspicuous things that surround us, things we use to organize our environment and which in turn we come to depend upon. Nothing seems to be more ordinary and therefore more harmless than a plant from the roadside and still, nothing is as weird, fragile, rugged and beautiful at the same time when removed from natural surroundings. Plants appear, disappear and show up again in a similar form - as do ideas, things and places, creatures and systems. They constantly migrate, permute and therefore are transitory.

For my piece «Transplant – Hanging Gardens», at the 5th Biennale for Contemporay Art in Gwangju, South Korea (2004), I used BigBags, soil and vegetation from the roadside. My aim was to create a situation which seems to be normal as well as bizarre: the planted bags were standing like aliens between other clean artworks and seemed like remains from a time long ago, when the building had been constructed. They are taken out of the constructions process and out of their causal context. The heavy big sized carrying bags are piled up as movable modules in front of the viewer.

Ilka Meyer