DENISE SCHELLMANN

To the naked eye water runs from the tap in Vienna clean and clear. Equally, it tastes pure. Though every six months kettles, dishwashers and washing machines, throughout the city, are clogged with calcium and supermarket shelves abound with products for de-calcifying major appliances and bathroom and kitchen surfaces. It’s a Xeno like paradox that provides an easy metaphor for describing a more-than-meets-the-eye phenomenon inter alia art, incremental transformation, [in]divisibility, and inner-worlds. Remember, that Xeno is the philosopher who posited the idea that the closer we get to something the further it is away as time-and-space can be eternally cut into ever-more infinitesimal slices.

Trained as a pharmaceutiacl chemist, artist Denise Schellmann, homes on the near invisible qualities of [our] water — with the help of a microscope — for her revelatory microcosmic imaginary presented at Viadukt. Schellmann has produced a suite of five-step  screenprints/drawings (the last layer is drawn not pressed following on from microscope-to-photograph-to-drawing-to-printing) based on microscope examination slides of water. She reveals the inner life of what to us looks clear and clean. We know, thanks to high school biology, National Geographic, the National Geographic Channel, and the Nature Channel, that water is full of all sorts of greeblies but prefer to pretend it’s a see through and stable element free of life. 

Even in the age of “gut health” and “good bacteria” — pandered across the Internet and splashed across the pages of newspaper lifestyle supplements and magazines — we sublimate any sense that water has a role as host to numerous actors and agents. Calcium, we cannot avoid, as we see it gunking up our appliances… telling ourselves it’s good for us. In the era of Veganism and lactose intolerance (does anybody drink a frosty glass of milk before bed anymore?) we can probably be thankful for the free bone boost? Clean, clear, calcium — whew!

Enter Denise Schellmann, taking on the role like many artists before her of revealing uncomfortable truths, and her image of a worm that looks like a slab of steak; begging the question — how many such slabs have we all consumed in recent times? Most of us are nervous around art and medicine and science… for good reason! 

The revelatory is not all so uncomfortable as her images include mineral crystals and plant matter that are relatively innocent by comparison and are beautiful to behold. There are facets and sequences and liminal tracings — shapes that remind us of gemstones and ladybirds — and soft flesh tones that quieten the eye and the soul and hark to images we’ve learnt from popular science of deep-space and inner-space that make us marvel at the coeval of the universal and technological — humanity’s facility for developing image making machines that make our worlds knowable. Even if fragmentary and produced as art — so without the comfort of dialectic qua thesis-antithesis — and in the realm of the fluid Denise Schellmann has produced a suite of prints that show us the sui generis of science in sympathetic hands and the potency of art for making smallness into bigness in a beautiful way.

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Simon Rees