Space Station

Weidele works with everyday materials and with space - the interplay of these elements help to create her original installation sculptures. Her subject areas include: vases, ships, small architectural structures and tall towers, mountains, flower pavilions, chandeliers, water lilies, cascades, hunting scenes, planetary space, and Kazakhstan with its spaceport Baikonur. 

Astrophysics is the most important science for Weidele, which is why she has designed a tower-like ‘space station’ for the Lichthof - alluding to the modular space stations Mir and ISS. 

Like Stephen Hawking however, Weidele poses questions of imaginary time in the universe. The museum as base of the installation is assigned the role of ‘past light cone’, above which the cone of the imaginary future opens up with her ‘space station’, bathed in green stellar light. The museum visitor is placed between the two, in the narrow divide of our current existence.

Heide Weidele's metamorphoses of objects from our throw-away culture function according to the principle of transformation: “Mostly low-grade materials such as cardboard, construction timber, found objects, pieces of plastic, and my own collection of photographs serve as a building set from which the works are put together in playful, unplanned processes and later dismantled - only to begin again with a new accumulation of the pieces.”

During a vacation on the beaches of Brittany in 1994, she discovered for her artistic work the colorful qualities of lightly bleached plastic pieces among the washed up shore debris. Since then, Heide Weidele's installation sculptures have consisted of colorful material and of pure color, employing plastic pieces because of their distinct hues and clear, concise forms. Colored fluorescent tubes are also integrated into the compositions. These are important aspects for the autonomous, spontaneous approach of the artist. 

www.heideweidele.de

Text: Brigitta Amalia Gonser, art historian