Original creations by Sunshine Coast resident Carolina Franzen (also known by her professional sobriquet aC Hömmken) reveal new dimensions within the German-born artist’s nuanced worldview. Her showcase Timely Cloud opened in Joe’s Lounge at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery on May 2, and is Franzen’s first solo exhibition of sculpture.
“It’s not necessarily a to and fro in terms of drawing and sculpture,” explained Franzen, who last July displayed hand-drawn abstracts on upcycled canvases at the Gibsons Public Library. She followed that solo debut with a show at the Rockwood Lodge Art Space last October. The alabaster intimacy of Joe’s Lounge offered her a new opportunity: “It was a nice opportunity here, for this space, to say: sculpture it is.”
The transitory assemblage of Timely Cloud reflects Franzen’s fascination with repurposed materials, as well as the complexities of her own heritage. Her doctoral thesis probed systematic roots of the Holocaust, a process complicated by her own status as a non-Jewish German. Likewise, her sculptures teem with paradoxes. Manufactured conduits produce unexpected outflows. In the case of Kinder Morgen, a tight-coiled rope transits a bivalved copper pipe: ethical tensions seem to stem from the ingredients themselves.
“Certain materials interest me more than others,” she said. “Industrial materials interest me. Something that has a feeling to it, a colour to it. And then I collect and play with materials to combine them.” In Chain Reaction, an arched saw blade forms the outstretched arms of a crab (its body shaped from discarded zip ties) reacting to outcry against the shishálth swiya Dock Management Plan.
“The crab’s arms, they’re a bit like a reaction to this supposed chain reaction that’s happened [in Pender Harbour]. It’s almost as a sign of when we lift our arms in fear, maybe in shock,” Franzen said. The evocation of the traditional Coast Salish welcome gesture is intentional. “You could say it’s a bit of an ally piece,” she added.
While cycling, Franzen scours roadsides and local thrift shops to collect materials for her three-dimensional pieces. One day, she happened upon a boxspring mattress and painstakingly unlinked its 200 rings. Bent into a geodesic orb whose vertices denote a human brain, Timely Cloud exists at the junction of industrial, organic and ethereal worlds. Similarly, her Bird Sanctuary — an inverted avian feeder bedecked in feathers — questions whether expansion of a shipping complex in Delta comes at the cost of migratory birds.
For Franzen, paradoxes are the point. “I think underlying these sculptures people do seem to see a sadness,” she observed. “I hope that when people see the sculptures they can also laugh, they can smile, they can engage with it in a very humane way, in an emotional way too, or in a rational way.”
Her exploration of power dynamics extends beyond effects of the fossil fuel and manufacturing industries. In Knob, she transforms an everyday doorknob mechanism — slung with a pair of voluptuous pliers — into a sly commentary on feminism. The delicately-balanced tool is simultaneously lanced by the hardware while providing a centre of gravity that keeps it in equilibrium.
“However truthful and important all focus on empowerment and change can be,” Franzen said, “its tool cannot only be hopefulness, at least not a hopefulness that has forgotten what there still is to mourn.”
Franzen’s Timely Cloud remains on display at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery until May 26.
