Isa Melsheimer’s Animalistic Architectures

In this concise show of new ceramic sculptures, Berlin-based artist Isa Melsheimer evolves her exploration of architecture from human utopian designs to natural and animal-built structures. ‘Continuous Process of Improvement’ at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Vienna presents works imbued with cultural history and near-magical properties that nonetheless hint at a dystopic future.

Dotted throughout the largest room of the gallery, five monolithic tree stumps unravel into splintered, crystalline shapes, walls with small geometric cut-outs nestled into them like fantastical lodgings. They might be read as cave dwellings, burrows or nesting holes, but their smooth walls suggest a more-than-natural touch. A moody palette of reddish and violet browns, deep blues and greige projects a sense of enchanted darkness, ruptured only by one bright seafoam stump. Dripping in glaze, Melsheimer’s organic forms seem to be frozen mid-metamorphosis: the dark, glossy surface of Fortlaufender Prozess der Verbesserung I (Continuous Process of Improvement I, 2023), for instance, is nerved by porous, epoxy clay veins and mottled with feathery specks of moss green, old as the hills.

One room over, three smaller Stilt Houses (2023) elegantly loop like art nouveau drawings, their round brown stems growing and intertwining into calyx-esque vessels formed by shiny petals in khaki and robin-egg blue. Like slick nests, they recall the pared-back visual poetry of turn of-the-century children’s books, such Sybille von Olfer’s The Story of the Root Children (1906), which transforms the natural into the magical. In the farthest room, three small, seemingly sea-born objects lie on the floor: overgrown with barnacles, the fist-sized Nests (2023) hint at submarine ecology, faded corals and every kind of shell – literal shelters whose porous, sandy surfaces are here tinged with flecks of pink.

These groups of works are interconnected by the three Azulejos (2023): wall hangings of wire-threaded, square clay tiles convening the hues and glazes of each room like colour charts. Their titles refer to the Portuguese and Spanish wall decorations found on the outside of churches and houses, tying Melsheimer’s animalistic shelters back to her artistic universe at large, which examines human buildings through collage and juxtaposition of textiles, architectural sculptures and living plants. She keeps an ongoing series of coloured-gouache sketches as an archive, two of which (Nr480, 2022, and Nr481, 2023) here depict concrete buildings: one overgrown with plants; the other set in dramatic, end-time scenery.  

While piercing the formal rigour of the ceramic works, the gouaches also hint at their backstory: the shift from an Anthropocentric perspective to Donna Haraway’s notion of the Chthulucene – a counter-narrative in which all species exist and act collaboratively. The ceramics thus play off the way, in an antidote to our late-capitalist throwaway society, animals often repair and reuse burrows and nesting places. However, keeping in mind the ever-advancing climate crisis, Melsheimer’s sculptures also evoke precarious conditions of human shelter in a more dystopic pretext: a future ruled by the force of nature.

While nature’s ‘Continuous Process of Improvement’ might be transferred onto human modes of building, for me, the reverse couldn’t quite hold true. Faced with familiar, at times fantastic, motifs and forms, the show made me ponder all the ways in which humans continue to intrude upon nature – upon animals and their fragile creations of home – in the name of culture. As pleasing as the idea of the Chthulucene is, I couldn’t help but wonder whether a truly utopian future might, in fact, be one without humans.

Isa Melsheimer’s ‘Continuous Process of Improvement’ is on view at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, until 13 May

_{Main image: Isa Melsheimer, Tuch (Lichen II), 2023, fabric, acrylic paint, embroidery thread, 1.4 ×1 m. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder; photo: Markus Wörgötter}