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Jessica Stockholder (United States)

Seattle, Washington, 1959

Born of Landscape Linoleum

 

"I want a few marks to engage in a conversation on this map."

With these words, the American artist Jessica Stockholder outlined her starting point for her unique, site-specific intervention Landscape Linoleum.

Stockholder’s only venture outdoors before her Middelheim project was Installation in My Father’s Backyard (1983), comprising a mattress, a wooden panel, wire and paint, combined with her father’s wooden garage. Landscape Linoleum similarly grafts itself onto the existing structure of the park. With painted wrecked cars, iron posts, polyester swimming pools, brightly coloured gravel, concrete, a terrace heater, a satellite dish, coloured cables and paint, Stockholder transformed the idyllic surroundings of Middelheim-Hoog into a brightly coloured building site.

Not only the trees and bushes, but also a few of the sculptures from the permanent collection were drawn into her composition. Through this they acquired the heterogeneous effect of a collage, highlighting the artificiality of this ‘natural’ environment. In her own words: ‘This work draws/carves into the work of the park, expands the dialogue or the story. It uses the “real” material of the grass, trees, earth, “sculpture”, to encourage a further flight of fantasy/fancy.’ In the course of the Nineties, Stockholder made an international name for herself with her colourful and, at first glance, apparently chaotic installations in galleries and museums. Everyday objects, building materials, painted and sculpted objects and ropes in various forms and colours, generate a complex web of visual relations and connected ideas.

Born of Landscape Linoleum is a small, permanent spin-off of the temporary installation in 1999.

 

Specifications

  • Born of Landscape Linoleum
  • 1999
  • h 250 cm x w 840 cm x d 1270 cm
  • Concrete, nylon, metal, box tree
  • MIDW500

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