Birgit Cauer

In my sculptures, works on paper and experimental set-ups, I explore the many facets of stone as a material and its essential role in the creation of all living things.
I use sculptural means to explore the limits of the material and its properties. To do this, I am driven into the stone and I try to discover its structures. In doing so, I free myself from the idea that I can control the stone and leave it more and more to other active forces such as salts, acids and trace elements in experimental arrangements. In this way, the processes of formation, transformation and corrosion become visible and tangible. The seemingly lifeless stone is transformed from a sculptural object into an idiosyncratic "actant" (cf. Bruno Latour, The Parliament of Things). I understand my sculptural work as an approach to the stone as a counterpart. Only by working in partnership with this material at the interface of natural and cultural design can these wondrously bizarre forms emerge.