New Fillings, from the exhibition SUB12, curated by Jessica Bridgfoot,
Substation, 2012
Excerpt from catalogue essay, by Jessica Bridgfoot
This meandering through the negative spaces leads me to rest in the perfectly balanced, hazy calm of Sanne Mestrom’s installation New Fillings. Mestrom indeed seeks out the quite intimate spaces in between and furnishes them with a measured and subtle poignancy. Within the bare white square of the gallery room, Mestrom has drawn our attention to the imperfections and the asides of the architecture, the polyps in the walls, the cracks in the floor, and the portholes in the walls have all undergone gentle interventions. Shiny bronze castings glint from within the holes in floor like scattered treasure; perfectly formed concrete rendered forms protrude from the old portholes like stoppers. Rather than conceal the wear and remnants of the building, Mestrom has – almost tenderly – enhanced them, imbuing these arbitrary markings and defunct armature with a new significance.
Two relief concrete ellipses sit in a pair on the floor, perfectly balanced, their shadow highlights the weight of their form and their charming composition defies the brutality of their material. Mestrom’s work is underpinned by a formality which hails the practice of early modernist sculptors – Brancusi, Miro and Calder all who strove to find balance in form, line, weight. As the title suggests – New Fillings – perhaps instead of our relentless searching we should take Mestrom’s advice, stop, be still and sit in the silences with a solid reason rather than flitting eternally from one screen to the next.
