SINA HENSEL

TOUCH: AN ENDLESS SPIRAL OF POTENTIALITIES FOR KNOWLEDGE-GATHERING, 2024

by Max Ferguson

Sina Hensel’s work catches its viewer on multiple planes, drawing its elements from the surrounding world and beyond. In the series of six tapestries The Lady and the Unicorn which was woven in Flanders in the 16th century, the five senses are positioned as important ways of gaining knowledge about our surrounding world. In Sina Hensel’s work at the residency Imaging Ecological Futures in Namur, she explores heat and the way it can be felt both physically and intangibly. The practical form of knowledge-gathering found in learning through touch and feeling is also supplemented by a trust in the esoteric processes in the natural world. These include the innate reactions of algae in the ocean to heat, the slow crack of earth as it dries and the incendiary transition of felt and wood to smoke and ash.

A hand reaches out from the past, looking to touch. A mediaeval tapestry that hangs in the Musée de Cluny in Paris gives its phantom hand to rough felt and wooden board dyed and manipulated in Namur. Heat leaves its shadow as it burns away wood and fibre. This way, the imprint of a hand into wood is touched doubly by the embroidered hand of five centuries past and by the laser that burns, transforming substance into smoke. These small fires flash for an instance and leave in their wake afterimages of the past, cropped and made anew for modern eyes. The afterimage settles into a swirl of European Indigo. Although opposite to fire, the wet sea is also not immune to heat. Colonies of algae in the sea turn rust-coloured as temperatures rise, weaving the waves into a red tide. This process is called algal bloom and speaks to the inherent ability of leaves, roots and flowers to stain and leave their colour behind. This power has been harnessed by humans for dye, but is also representative of organic processes of protection in the natural world. Skin is an organ that also blushes. Blush is a rush of blood surging under the surface. Much like the tinted earth that takes colour from iron oxides. Damp earth as clay reddens under heat as ceramic forms are fired.

A hand guides, forms and moulds. The swirl of a fingerprint impressed into clay sits side by side with a spiral indent, material removed resembling an ammonite trapped by time into stone. These present gestures of putting a hand to clay recall ancient traditions of artisanal workers that have endured over the years. Endure has a Latin root: to harden. Clay that is formed into leaf shapes and arrows point forwards. They are remnants of the hours taken to transform the moisture of earth into hardened bodies ready for the glaze and the kiln. These bodies are vessels, prepared to hold heat and to pass it along. When you press two hands to the dimpled surfaces of Hensel’s ceramics, they are almost burning. Their inhuman heat brings them alive. They are kindred cyborgs, imitating body heat generated through cables and metal bars peeking through holes pierced in ceramic compartments. Their invisible touch permeates the space through its tentacled heat. Heat is a hand that leaves its mark through the saturation of fabric and the solidity of ceramic.

A hand hovers above a unicorn’s head. This hand that resembles your own and the closeness creates a triangle of tension between your hand, her hand and the downy head. The whorls of the fur recall the natural grain in the wood - both so familiar, lending themselves to the mirage-experience of touch. Young, velvety wool finds its double in the white felt that is speckled with small grains, proof of a life lived before. The burnt felt smells strong; the musty, lived-in smell of a farmhouse rises from this uneven textile. The hands that wove the tapestry did their nimble work in Flanders. It is important that we remember the details of the past: the clammy skin of the palm and the slow unspooling of the thread. These events have passed and yet live on in the meticulous path of the laser cutter.
 

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Ava, 2021

by Sofia Dati, curator at Beursschouwburg- Multidisciplinary Art Center, Brussels/BE

A string is knotted to form a circle, then a play of finger movements knots the thread into shapes and patterns commonly called string figures. The exhibition lays out a string game for multiple players. It is an invitation to tune into different understandings of colour, delving into the intertwining dynamics that tie human and other-than-human beings in relation to one another. Organisms constantly release, share and are traversed by colours. In recounting these passages, Sina Hensel’s narrative strategy is akin to the practice of making string figures that Donna Haraway describes as a way of composing multispecies storytelling’ or ‘multispecies worlding’.1 Relationship is at the center of how Hensel envisages the process of making, where each step reminds us that - to use Haraway’s words again - ‘[n]atures, cultures, subjects, and objects do not preexist their intertwined worldings.’2 Departing from an understanding of the environment as a set of relations, the exhibition brings together traces and devices of colour-shifting processes that reveal how changes in pigmentation are entangled with dynamics of care and nurture but also serve as warning signals of affliction and distress.

FIRST KNOT: ALGAE SECRETE PIGMENTS

Cultivating requires care, attention and time. These are the ingredients that the artist deploys to grow different species of algae from which she extracts pigments to make natural dyes. The specific algae that gave her the red pigment used to colour the fabric and resin panels in the exhibition, is a micro-organism containing astaxanthin, a red pigment that is notably released due to UV-light exposure, nutrient inhibition, high salinity or other types of environmental stress. Its red coating simultaneously acts as a protection screen and as a signal of distress. This pigment serves as the red thread that runs through the exhibition.

SECOND KNOT: THEY TRAVERSE OTHER ORGANISMS

That same chemical compound (astaxanthin) is also found in salmon, krill, shrimp and other life forms that are accustomed to ingesting algae on a regular basis. However, in the artificial environment of an aquatic farm or a birdhouse, synthetically produced pigments are added to the animals’ diet to ‘preserve’ the bright colour of their flesh, skin or feathers. The Guarà bird that we see in the video, also known as red or scarlet ibis, is an indigenous species of several regions in South America and the Caribbean. The bird metabolises carotenoid pigments which flow into its feathers and dye them red over time. Moved from an overcrowded birdhouse of the Antwerp zoo, some Guarà birds found a new home at the Verbeke Foundation (BE), where Hensel paid them monthly visits in order to capture the gradual transformation of their colour palette. The images of these displaced birds point to the role of habitat, metabolic and nurturing processes in rendering colour shifts as secretions of environmental information. The wallpaper at the entrance of the gallery and in the hall displays a series of film stills in a pictorial mosaic that highlights the colours of the birds and of their surroundings. The clay sculptures laying on the ground wear the traces of feathers, salmon skin and orange peelings which, following the logic of synthetic bird and fish food, are also made more alluring on (super)market stalls through the use of man-made pigments. These matters, subject to artificially induced colour alterations, inhabit the space like fossils, sediments or shadows.

THIRD KNOT: HEAT HOLDS THEM IN ITS GRIP 

We often think of heat as a protective element. We use blankets, heaters and hot water bottles to soothe our sorrows and protect ourselves from the staggering cold. Heat is also an essential component of the dyeing process, as it allows the pigment to sink into the fabric. Between sculptures and tools, the ceramic heaters disseminated throughout the space allude to the artist’s process but also introduce air as a tangible element and active protagonist of this story.

FOURTH KNOT: AND SUNLIGHT PULLS THEM AWAY

From sunburnt skin to algae turning red, several organisms react to sunlight (UV) with pigment secretions. Other materials, like dyed fabric, will tend to lose their glow under the sun. The shifting colours that populate the exhibition generate a language of their own, one that speaks through gradual change, erosion and eventually erasure. Hensel uses pigment extraction and dyeing techniques to observe patterns of reaction and transformation. The large resin panels as well as the samples of red fabric disseminated throughout the space are dyed with the same pigment but will react differently to the broad daylight to which they are exposed. Colour will fade away at different paces. Here, the exhibition space functions like a laboratory that explores the effects of daylight on different dyed supports.

From one knot to another, a pattern unfolds. It is called Ava. The roots of the name Ava are multiple, but it is around its derivation from avis, which means bird or birdlike in Latin, that this story revolves. From the process of dyeing resin to the feather coat of Guarà birds, colour becomes a lens through which signs of environmental change can be read and experienced.

1 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chtulucene, Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2016, p.10.

2 Ibidem, p.13

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Petrichor, 2020

by Lucie Ménard

Time-based acts of researching, nurturing, and harvesting are all embedded in Sina Hensel’s artistic practice. Her studio becomes a place of cohabitation, an ecosystem that allows her to reflect on the means of production of a work, starting with the growth of materials. Algae, colouring plants, and cats are all living beings that partake in her creative process. The artist experiments with tinctorial properties of living organisms and combines them with traditional dyeing techniques to produce her own non-toxic pigments. These are later applied to translucent textiles, mixed with resin, or embedded in glass. The resulting works function as fragile documentation of the many parameters that influenced their realisation: changing light conditions in the studio, a conversation with a neighbour, the view out of the window, a cat’s movement. When the works enter the exhibition space, their state is everything but final, as the pigments continue to change with time and atmospheric conditions. Immaterial and invisible parameters over which the artist has no control become the main agent of transformation. Sina’s colours have lives of their own. 

The installation Shimmer seen on elastic ID cards or jellyfishes consists of various elements produced especially for the exhibition space of CIAP. On the floor, liquid-like surfaces capture the sunlight entering through the windows. The resin used for the sculpture is tainted when still in a liquid state, with blue algae (arthrospira platensis) and charcoal powder. Every time when Sina Hensel works in a new place, another colour enters her palette. In this case, it has been black, reminiscent of coal present in the soil all over the former mining site of Winterslag. This industrial resource is seen here from a painterly perspective. The resin sculptures become transparent shells, incarnating the history of the surrounding landscape. 

The same charcoal pigment, in combination with ochre, a natural clay pigment, and blue and yellow algae, was also used in the painting composed of pieces of linen and cotton fabric sewn together. The large format of this painting is unusual for Sina Hensel’s oeuvre, which includes mostly works scaled according to her body. Though non-figurative, her painted works could be inscribed in the tradition of still life paintings, capturing the soul of the objects and beings that led to their execution. 

Sina is fascinated by different temporalities and transformations of organic matter: from seeds to flowers, from plants to pigments, from trees to charcoal. What could better embody this interest than a garden? A colouring garden that had been planted at CIAP director’s backyard last spring will in the future be moved to the new house of CIAP and FLACC at C-Mine. In the meantime, Petrichor presents a small flower garden on the terrace. The plants selected (hypericum perforatum, isatis tinctoria, tanacetum vulgare, alcea rosa) are known for their colouring qualities. These plants will remain at CIAP as a resource to be nurtured; each of them withholds a promise of a painting.

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Our Still Lives, 2019

by Caroline Dumalin

Sina Hensel is a painter who doesn’t use paint – at least not the standardized, readymade kind. Instead, she dyes her fabric with a natural powder extracted from specific varieties of algae, which produce remarkably bright and light sensitive shades of colour. After drying, she sews the painted pieces of fabric together and stretches them onto a metal structure that recalls the proportions of the artist’s body. Installed at some distance from the wall, the translucent paintings function as a projection screen. The light that shines through also fades the colours over time. In this shadow play between outside and inside, Hensel directs our attention to how forms of nature and forms of art can coexist and impact each other.

The word alga goes back to the Latin name for seaweed, but it also has a second, figurative meaning, “a thing of little worth”. Hensel keeps algae in her studio. Not to grow them for use (she gets them from a lab), but to acknowledge their existence. At home, Hensel shares a space with her cats, in collaboration with whom she produced a set of sculptures. Leaving moist clay tiles around the apartment, she observed how the cats would interact with them, sometimes even sleep on them, eventually capturing the traces of their activity. In the multi-part installation that Hensel conceived for a former veterinary school, these cat imprints are placed in contrast to a walkway of resin tiles, which are reserved for human visitors. Whereas clay absorbs light entirely, resin is a highly reflective surface with a watery shine. Dyed with the same algae as the neighbouring paintings, the resin tiles react to circumstances beyond the artist’s control. Staging different ways of inhabiting a space, Hensel includes the perspectives of plants, animals and people, imposing no hierarchy between them.

How to lend agency to a material, or even a living organism, is not a strict subject or method for Hensel, but above all a personal concern. Applied to art, it comes down to thinking about the means of production; how a work is made, and the responsibility that comes with it. For a painter, this implies questioning the conventions of the medium, such as the use of toxic turpentine or the idea of a painting as an autonomous, closed space. In working with algae, Hensel also found a way to go beyond aesthetic criteria in her use of colours. Algae produce colours that have a life of their own, which, in other industries, serve a technical function. In salt mines, they generate different shades of red that represent the level of salinity, indicating when the fleur de sel is ready for harvest. Just like in Hensel’s work, you won’t notice any change of colour unless you return after some weeks have passed.

Hensel makes a case for the inner rhythm and quiet qualities of a work, up to its smallest details. The tradition of still life painting remains an important reference for her in that regard, especially in the sensitive manner of Chardin, Claesz and Morandi. If sometimes these painters would incorporate their own image in the reflection of glassware, they could give equal care to the depiction of a dead animal awaiting preparation. In her own painterly process, Hensel likewise mirrors an empathy for the soul of things and beings, however minor their role in the cycle of life may appear.