Sina Hensel’s work catches its viewer on multiple planes, drawing its elements from the surrounding world and beyond. In the series of six tapestries The Lady and the Unicorn which was woven in Flanders in the 16th century, the five senses are positioned as important ways of gaining knowledge about our surrounding world. In Sina Hensel’s work at the residency Imaging Ecological Futures in Namur, she explores heat and the way it can be felt both physically and intangibly. The practical form of knowledge-gathering found in learning through touch and feeling is also supplemented by a trust in the esoteric processes in the natural world. These include the innate reactions of algae in the ocean to heat, the slow crack of earth as it dries and the incendiary transition of felt and wood to smoke and ash.
Fig. 2: Hensel showing the madder root (rubia tinctorum) she uses to create red dye
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@ Max Ferguson
A hand reaches out from the past, looking to touch. A mediaeval tapestry that hangs in the Musée de Cluny in Paris gives its phantom hand to rough felt and wooden board dyed and manipulated in Namur. Heat leaves its shadow as it burns away wood and fibre. This way, the imprint of a hand into wood is touched doubly by the embroidered hand of five centuries past and by the laser that burns, transforming substance into smoke. These small fires flash for an instance and leave in their wake afterimages of the past, cropped and made anew for modern eyes. The afterimage settles into a swirl of European Indigo. Although opposite to fire, the wet sea is also not immune to heat. Colonies of algae in the sea turn rust-coloured as temperatures rise, weaving the waves into a red tide. This process is called algal bloom and speaks to the inherent ability of leaves, roots and flowers to stain and leave their colour behind. This power has been harnessed by humans for dye, but is also representative of organic processes of protection in the natural world. Skin is an organ that also blushes. Blush is a rush of blood surging under the surface. Much like the tinted earth that takes colour from iron oxides. Damp earth as clay reddens under heat as ceramic forms are fired.
A hand guides, forms and moulds. The swirl of a fingerprint impressed into clay sits side by side with a spiral indent, material removed resembling an ammonite trapped by time into stone. These present gestures of putting a hand to clay recall ancient traditions of artisanal workers that have endured over the years. Endure has a Latin root: to harden. Clay that is formed into leaf shapes and arrows point forwards. They are remnants of the hours taken to transform the moisture of earth into hardened bodies ready for the glaze and the kiln. These bodies are vessels, prepared to hold heat and to pass it along. When you press two hands to the dimpled surfaces of Hensel’s ceramics, they are almost burning. Their inhuman heat brings them alive. They are kindred cyborgs, imitating body heat generated through cables and metal bars peeking through holes pierced in ceramic compartments. Their invisible touch permeates the space through its tentacled heat. Heat is a hand that leaves its mark through the saturation of fabric and the solidity of ceramic.
A hand hovers above a unicorn’s head. This hand that resembles your own and the closeness creates a triangle of tension between your hand, her hand and the downy head. The whorls of the fur recall the natural grain in the wood - both so familiar, lending themselves to the mirage-experience of touch. Young, velvety wool finds its double in the white felt that is speckled with small grains, proof of a life lived before. The burnt felt smells strong; the musty, lived-in smell of a farmhouse rises from this uneven textile. The hands that wove the tapestry did their nimble work in Flanders. It is important that we remember the details of the past: the clammy skin of the palm and the slow unspooling of the thread. These events have passed and yet live on in the meticulous path of the laser cutter.
About the author:
Max Ferguson is a Brussels-based artist from Hong Kong who uses the curatorial as a basket to hold her various interests. With her practice and foundations firmly rooted in the audiovisual arts, in recent years, she has branched out into writing and exhibition-making in the contemporary arts. This blurring of lines between techniques, forms and disciplines is a binding element within Ferguson's constellation of work. Ferguson tests the limits of poetry and the moving image in order to explore how we can relate our own experiences to others. Outside of her own practice of writing and filmmaking, Ferguson is a founding member of the cinema collective LuCi which places Brussels as the setting for varied encounters between students, artists and cultural workers with the moving image in all its forms. Ferguson holds a Masters of Audiovisual Arts - Animation from LUCA School of Arts Brussels and is graduating from the Curatorial Studies post-graduate programme at KASK Gent with the exhibition Grains of Sands like Mountains at Kunsthal Gent.
