Jindřiška Jabůrková↓

About the work

Matter of time

You enter a room full of fog, the water turns into steam here, settling on metal objects and slowly wrapping them in rust and copper, the salt evaporates and gets into the air. Can you smell something, perhaps incense or wet stone? Petrichor, falling on concrete…

Matter overflows from one form to another, exchanging energy and capturing recollections and memory in time. It has its identity, consciousness and movement. Found, newly created, and trash materials living their own lives. Form transformation, morphogenesis, growth and destruction in an endless cycle. Contextual perception of matter, alchemical transformation, changes of state, changes of state of mind. The idea travels from the elementary parts to the whole of matter in the world.

Jindřiška Jabůrková is a graduate from the Sculpture 2 studio. Her work intertwines subjects linked with the relation between humans and their surroundings, memory, and Nature. In her latest realizations, the material itself is more important to her than the appearance of the objects. She tries to think of materials as living substances of this world, and to treat them with the awareness of their potential and meaning. She is interested in the ideas of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the theories of Jane Bennett, and the conceptual approach of Joseph Beuys.

Jabůrková touches upon subjects related to rituals and traditions. Rather than human memory, she is interested in the memory of places or matter, the time that is stored in matter, the principles of growth and destruction, in the deposition of layers. She observes the natural processes taking place in cities, employs photography to record places that attract her with their rawness and tenderness at the same time – brownfields, random street installations of rubble, poles, rubbish and plants, an industrial landscape with wildlife. Everything is alive, with one substance changing into another, crumbling concrete bridges being transformed by natural influences. Remains of buildings and rubble springing into new forms almost reminiscent of ancient columns; modern archeology examining the real prime matter and at the same time revealing layers of colored plaster or tile deposits in the bathroom that still remembers the smell of your shampoo. Constant flow, extinction and origination, one absorbs the other. And equally, people penetrate this by their actions. They overturn the land and return or move it. The artist conceives this process from various angles – either via fleeting photographs of excavations and tailings, via sculptures inspired by folk narrations from the region of Moravské Kopanice with its local legends about the connection of man with a specific place through hair, or via paraphrasing a Middle-Eastern desert ritual of purgation by sand. Jindřiška Jabůrková’s works originate in the process of pondering over the human body in relation to the soil, with which it once used to be in much closer contact than today.