The German artist’s first UK solo show is full of thick lengths of sealant and knotty foam pipes that look like a DIY gone wrong. But look closer and these beguiling works evoke societal as much as material collapse
If you’re considering bathroom renovations, I would perhaps advise against hiring Lisa Herfeldt to do the work.
Yes, it’s true, she’s something of a whiz with a silicone gun – creating compelling sculptures from this unlikely art material. But the more you look at her creations the more you realise that something is a little off. The thick lengths of sealant she produces stretch beyond the shelves on which they sit, sagging off the edges towards the floor. The knotty foam pipes bulge until they split. Some creations escape their acrylic glass box homes entirely, becoming a magnet for dust and hair. Let’s just say the Checkatrade reviews would not be pretty.
“I sometimes have the feeling that things are alive in a room,” says the German artist when we meet in Margate, where she is about to open her first UK solo show at Roland Ross gallery. “That’s why I came to use this foam material because it has this very bodily texture and feeling.”
Indeed there’s something rather body horror about Herfeldt’s work, from the phallic bulge that protrudes, hernia-like, from its cylindrical stand in the centre of the gallery, to the intestinal coils of foam that rupture like medical emergencies. On one wall Herfeldt has framed photocopies of the works viewed from different angles: they look like wormy parasites picked up on a microscope, or growths on a petri-dish. “It interests me that there are things in our bodies happening that also have their own life,” she says. “Things you can’t see or control.”
