Heavy Metals / Silk Cut

In her sculptures Alice Channer (*1977, Oxford, UK, lives and works in London) explores the relationship between materials, bodies, machines and industrial or technological pro-cesses. With relish, she combines her highly industrialised objects with human gestures or with natural traces such as physical or geological remains.

The exhibition Heavy Metals / Silk Cut spans across the two buildings of the Kunstmuseum and the Kunsthalle Appenzell. It features new works, including an architectural intervention, complemented by an overview of sculptures, drawings and installations from the last decade.

In her explorations of materials and processes, Alice Channer casts and bends metals or folds fabrics, draws with cigarette ash and manifests the hidden dimensions of the world of matter. She offers a perspective on what lies beyond the categories and assumptions that shape our perception of objects and our relationship to them. Channer’s works consist of geological and natural materials or representations of natural elements, such as shells, fingers or stones. The artist transforms these in profound, synthetic processes, often in professional manufacturing facilities that have nothing to do with the production of art, such as factories for paint coating or the chemical industry. She had, for example, the shells of spider crabs and brown crabs vacuum-metallised, allowing the authentic physicality of these objects to collide with the result of identical, rhythmic and mechanical working steps. Industrial methods of production, such as the precision engineering of CNC milling to shape aluminium into the desired form or couture techniques to fold images of geological layers in heavy crêpe de Chine, are constitutive of form. Channer relentlessly juxtaposes the organic and the artificial, the biological and the industrial, weaving the traces of production processes into the language of her sculptures. She not only confronts her artistic signature with the cold aesthetics of mechanical shaping, but also points to the fragility of the ecology with these seductive yet fragile exoskeletons.

The disk-shaped sculpture entitled Starship (Super Heavy) (2022) is made of Portland stone quarried on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, England. Their porous surfaces bear the traces of fossils of ancient sea creatures. Shiny aluminium has been cast in some of the indentations left by the spearhead-shaped imprints of tower snails, while red crepe satin has been accordion folded into one of three round recesses and ammonites made of aluminium placed in two others. Like relics of living beings that have survived geological time, these contrasting fragments join together to form a unified whole. The work mixes different materials, both natural and human-made. Organisms can be seen here that have bonded with limestone over millions of years, but at the same time the artist also creates a link to the synthetic and industrial processes that have gone into making the red fabric.

The sculpture suggests various associations. The title alludes to the major SpaceX rocket project, initiated by Elon Musk with the goal of enabling the colonisation of another planet, and hence calls to mind the potential of life beyond Earth, which would transform our concept of corporeality in terms of both time and space as well as matter. The material of limestone in turn points to geological time, taking us back to the past life of fossils, traces of which can still be found in numerous buildings in Central London. The crepe satin alludes thematically to the production processes involved in making synthetic products as well as to the fashion industry. The complexity of human intervention in the biological, geological and atmospheric processes on Earth has thus been veritably inscribed in the materialisation of the sculpture Starship (Super Heavy).

Many of the artist’s works focus on geological and natural materials or the representation of natural elements such as seashells or stones. She transforms these components using elaborate synthetic processes, in most cases in professional or industrial production plants. Crustacean Satellites (2018) consists of vacuum-metallised and lacquered spider and brown crabs. Although the individual pieces are the result of identical, rhythmic and mechanical industrial production steps, the traces left by human hands are nonetheless visible. 

Alice Channer’s works always incorporate the presence of their maker. This is not necessarily the artist herself, however, but may instead be the factory employees involved in the fabrication process. In this work, the artist contrasts emotion with machine production, juxtaposing at eye level the precious exoskeletons with the suspension devices used at the production plant. We are invited to discover in this way certain spots in the highly industrialised objects where the natural structures have been left untouched, as though they might be accidental, human gestures, or perhaps physical or geological remains.

The artist works with a surprising variety of materials, textures and techniques. Her works contrast strongly in terms of their lustre and softness or hardness, their texture and colour, their naturalness or artificiality. Produced especially for Channer’s solo exhibition in Appenzell, Rockpool (2023) is a horizontal sculpture that sprawls across two rooms at the Kunstmuseum, separated by a wall and a passageway. 

Rockpool is a provocatively arti-ficial sculpture. Its title recalls watery tidal pools by the sea, but this pool is dried up and filled with salt. The artist references here the extraction of rock salt from the Swiss mountains that surround us, generating a product just like a factory does, but she also evokes dried-up bodies of water and oceans. The purity of the salt stands in contrast to the shape of the sculpture, which is based on a satellite image of an oil spill. In the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, 134 million gallons of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, contaminating 1 300 miles of coastline. Instead of filling the work with a black oil-like substance, however, Channer furnishes it with bright white salt. By uniting two apparently unrelated invents in one sculpture the artist challenges our perception. 

The sculpture on view in the exhibition was preceded by an outdoor version. Rockpool (2022) was part of the project High Desert Test Sites 2022: The Searchers (Group), Mojave Desert, Southern California, USA, 16 April–29 May 2022.

Burial (2016) consists of varied to-scale versions of a lump of concrete Channer found near her studio in East London, a district where construction and demolition work is the order of the day. She had the lump 3D scanned and elongated using a computer program. The ridges on the resulting objects are the marks left by a robotic arm used to mill the shapes from a foam block. These forms seem oddly organic, their surfaces reminiscent of rock formations that have been eroded by the movement of water over thousands of years. And yet the sculptures are the product of technological and industrial processes. They are made of cast aluminium bronze and Corten steel. As suggested by the title and by the shape of the rocks, which are similar in size to the human body, they refer to the finite nature of human life, calling to mind sarcophagi.

“Linear Bivalves (quintuple green) (2018) is a wall-based work comprising thirty vertical rectilinear bars to which mussel shells are clipped horizontally at regular intervals, like ordered leaves on a branch. The bars are installed in two rows, in groups of three; in each group, the first two ‘branches’ are metallised in silver, the third in green. This gives the work a rhythmic vibration as one reads across it, like a scanner reading a barcode. There is an absurd humour in Channer’s attempt to industrially coat these organic forms that still bear traces of their sea life. And there is something sinister in the glitzy finish and regimented presentation of the piece that belies its festive impression.”

At the end of the building we come upon an elongated horizontal sculpture: Birthing Pool (2019). The gallery floor is filled with black pellets made from recycled HDPE, a petroleum-derived polymer and a ubiquitous raw material used in a wide variety of products from plastic bags to children’s toys, as well as by the automotive and cosmetics industries. Viewers step right into the pellet bath, where they can then sit down and blend in with the material. The pellets, which are meant to gradually litter the adjoining room in the course of the exhibition, feel surprisingly pleasant to the touch with their cooling properties, despite recalling plastic waste.

Set amidst the pellets are elongated stainless steel containers displaying cloud-like shapes into which textiles have been layered and folded, forming loops and repetitions. The volume of the vertically embedded fabrics, which seem to gasp for air like the compressed bellows of an accordion, creates a horizontal image. The work is at once playful and elegant, horizontal and vertical, soft and hard. The sculpture was modelled on the gigantic giant water lilies, which are characterised by their plate-shaped floating leaves. In the 19th century, the decorative Nymphaeaceae, which are also toxic and can cause respiratory paralysis, became popular collectors’ delights in botanical gardens. Channers seductive use of colour, sheen and surface texture also creates a lingering sense of unease as we sit down in the ocean of plastic pellets, knowing that the microplastic will be excreted into nature after the lifetime of products made from HDPE.

Materials and forms that are found underground, such as rocks, fossils, metal and lava, are brought up to the surface in these works. Channer creates a playful juxtaposition of form and material in Granite and Concrete (both 2015), stimulating viewers’ associations in a way that was once perfected by the Surrealists and afterwards adopted by the advertising industry. 

The two wall-mounted works depict a lava flow, an image the artist first stretched and cut up into pieces before having it printed on fabric. That image is superimposed by another one showing a ribbed plastic tube used in building services engineering that somewhat resembles a spinal column. The flat prints are each paired with a concrete, three-dimensional sphere resting on the floor, cut in such a way that it appears to be sinking into the ground. The two works exemplify the artist’s interest in materials and physicality in a precarious state oscillating between naturalness and manipulation, organic and artificial, humanoid and machine, two- and three-dimensionality. 

The spandex-covered aluminium tubes in Gills (2012) glide up the wall, clinging to it closely before extending out into the room and then snaking through the open space in an almost awkward movement, only to then find their way back into a geometric form. The curved tubes in fact follow the silhouettes of Yves Saint Laurent’s sketches for his Le Smoking Suits, while the spandex is printed with a heavily distorted image of Channer’s arm, warped even further by being wrapped around a pole. Gills is a study of anthropomorphism in objects, posing the question of why figuration should necessarily imply a human form.

This work, like others by the artist, consists of a flat surface that she folds, curves, stretches and contracts in order to explore sculptural aspects of volume and scale. By examining the surfaces, materials and processes that make up our post-industrial environment, she questions what it means to be embodied in relation to these flat places, be they technological, industrial, virtual or commercial. 

The surface of Megaflora (2021), a scanned and greatly enlarged bramble branch that stands like a column in the room, is riddled with ridges. It is a sand-cast aluminium monument to an organism that forces its way through the cracks of urban terrain that is in fact hostile to plant growth. The transformation of the blackberry bush into a sculpture on whose surface the traces and ridges left by that process remain visible and tangible, is both powerful and violent. The monumentality of the piece is intimidating, the magnified thorns commanding a threatening presence. And yet Megaflora is also an appealing work. It remains hollow inside, a sensual invitation to look closer, as if we were seeing something we desire. In this work, Channer contrasts the complexity of the natural world with the processes of industrial production. In terms of material, texture, scale and weight, the transformation of the life form into a metallic object is not so much a reference to a former existence as an ontological repositioning.

“While looking into car manufacturing, Channer discovered that cleaning discs made from ostrich feathers are used to remove dust from the surface of vehicles between applications of paint. When installed in factories, the feathers look like a burlesque carwash, their soft, decadent forms spinning over the tops and sides of vehicles. Channer sent me the sales PDF for a company in Germany that supplies these feathers to high-end carmakers. The document explains how ‘the ostrich feathers are glued by hand with silicone-free adhesives by specially trained female employees’. At the end of the file is a photograph of women dancing at a carnival, dressed in diamanté bikinis and large red feathers. In the context of car manufacturing, the feathers have been imbued with an erotic mystique: a mythos of the decorative and soft-handed feminine against the cool, hard, male-coded exteriors of luxury cars. For the works Body Shop and Cold Metal Bodies (both 2023), feather discs are suspended from the ceiling on a series of metal chains. Placed in the gallery, the discs are given space to breathe, the associa-tions instilled in them — eroticism, industry, luxury, theatricality, absurdity, sleaze — coaxed into the atmosphere of the room.”

Excerpt from The Stich Unpicker by Rosanna McLaughlin. The essay was commissioned for the
monographic exhibition publication Alice Channer, ed. by Kunstmuseum / Kunsthalle Appenzell, September 2023.

“Referring to polishing processes in the automobile industry that use ostrich feathers for their high-precision cleaning, it is sensuous, seductive, and playful. Suspended horizontally from hefty vertical chains, circular discs of ostrich plumes tickle the viewer’s fancy, evoking the impetuous flounce of tail feathers. Channer’s piece conjures up cartoon-like images of the large birds flirting with luxury automobiles, but not without a darker undertone of the encounter between the animal and the mechanical (which rarely ends well for the former).”

Excerpt from Cigarettes, Grime and Glamour in the work of Alice Channer by Zoë Gray. The essay was commissioned for the monographic exhibition publication Alice Channer, ed. by Kunstmuseum / Kunsthalle Appenzell, September 2023.

Pangolin (2023) is a site-specific architectural intervention involving the windows of the Kunstmuseum Appenzell. The work got its name from the artist’s encounter with a pangolin at the Natural History Museum in St.Gallen, but it also responds to the scaly façade of the Kunstmuseum. The images comprising the work stem from photographed rocks in the Crackington Formation — a crumbling, geologically significant section of the British coast. The photos were digitally manipulated and distorted, and then applied to silk through a process normally used to print clothing. The resulting prints in intense orange hues and dramatic browns and blacks were then folded. The pleats overlay the geological body, with the effect of downplaying the massive scale of the rock. These pleated rock formations were in turn photographed and printed on fabric blinds that in the end became part of the architecture. One might say that the window blinds dress the museum in a digitally pleated robe, with the metal body of the art museum imagined as a fashionably dressed pangolin amidst a landscape of ancient mountains.

Introducing the second part of the exhibition Silk Cut at the Kunsthalle, the monumental silk work Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies) (2023) relates to the outdoor landscape visible through the large gallery window and to Pangolin on the façade of the Kunstmuseum. Alice Channer has deployed here a special pleating technique used mainly in the fashion industry to manipulate textiles with heat and pressure in order to create permanent folds. The pleated fabric behaves almost like an accordion, wrapping itself around the body and giving it a distinctive form. In Channer’s works, the two-dimensional fabric support is transformed into a kind of scaly reptilian skin and is turned into a three-dimensional sculpture. The fabrication process combines both manual and machine production: The folds are created by hand, while the heat press fixes them in place. Before pleating the silk, the artist has an image printed on it and digitally alienates its form, colours and structure by means of displacement and superimposition. This changes the original look of the folded surfaces, which increasingly take on the appearance of fossils, a motif that can be found in various works in the exhibition.

In Ammonite and Ammonite (both 2019), placed on the gallery floor, two large aluminium “bones” curl around a coil of black corrugated tubes normally used as conduits for electrical wiring, which are held together here by steel bands. Inside the tubes, which like countless other industrial products are made of HDPE pellets, are small ammonite fossils. The surfaces of the tubes are marked by furrows echoing the ridges and edges shaping the structure of the aluminium bodies left by the robot arm. In the industrial process, traces left on object surfaces by the CNC milling machine are usually sanded away before casting, but Channer deliberately incorporates them into the language of her sculptures. The combination of
design, materials and process traces gives rise to associations that link wide-ranging temporal dimensions, reaching from prehistoric life forms to industrially produced goods.

Mechanoreceptor, Icicles (red, red) (triple spring, triple strip) (2018) explores the relationships between materials, industrial and technological processes, and the body. Rectangular support frames hang from the ceiling on red cords that dangle all the way down to the floor, where they end in loops. Channer developed this structures with the help of a metalworking company, so that the manufacturing process itself becomes an agent in the final work. Aluminium fingers moulded from a cast of the artist’s right index finger are attached to 210 custom-made clamps. The finger was first scanned and then digitally elongated and rematerialised using a 3D printer. In a serial process on the production line, the tips of the fingers were dipped in bright red thermo-plastic and coated with a seductive gloss that lends them a disconcertingly artificial air. The individual components of the sculpture come together like props to form a stage set on which every-thing seems to be in motion, making us witnesses to the moment of creation of this glamorous product. By staging her own finger, Channer necessarily refers to the concept of modern artistic authorship, which views the artist as the authentic creator of a work, and confronts that notion with industrial — and creative — design pro-cesses as part of mechanical and technological production.

The paper works in her series Life Without Air (2022/23) are made of ashes from Silk Cut cigarettes, which the artist mixes with water in an ashtray. The drawings call to mind organic forms such as plant or animal skeletons. Polyethylene microspheres, which can be used to measure the movement of fluids through a system, whether mechanical or organic, settle onto the paper, where they shine like tiny jewellery beads.

The exhibition at the Kunsthalle is entitled Silk Cut, after the cigarette brand. The name is used here in allusion to a 1980s advertising cam-paign by the Saatchi & Saatchi agency (whose co-founder Charles Saatchi later became a London gallerist who had a significant influence on British art in the 1990s). When Channer was around seven years old, she saw a large-format advertising poster in London that depicted a piece of luxurious dark purple satin fabric that had been sliced through by a knife blade. The campaign was sexy with a tinge of violence, with a high visual impact that made it a formative aesthetic encounter for Channer. It pre-empted the ban on depicting cigarettes in tobacco advertising by not only avoiding showing the product it was promoting but also eschewing the brand name and instead visualising it as material and action. While the title of the advertisement, “Silk Cut Modern”, sounded like the name of an art gallery, obvious echoes of Lucio Fontana’s sliced canvases as well as Surrealist associations tied in subversively with the aesthetics of art.

“Dry Cask (Silk Cut) is a floor-based work comprising three circular containers of slightly different heights and diameters. One contains black pleated crepe silk satin, while the fabric in the other two is the vibrant purple of the Silk Cut advert [...]. The black fabric is presented alone, the edges of its pleats reading as geological folds or the swirls of a fingerprint, reflected by the shiny edges of its container. In each of the other two units is a silver form: vapor-blasted aluminium sand casts of ammonite fossils (the small one matte, the larger one chromed) that nestle like chubby silkworms among the pleats.

The sculpture is loosely modelled on the cylindrical dry-cask flasks used for storing nuclear waste, which Channer imagines cut open. [...] The work is part of an answer to her own earlier call for forms that are uncertain, other, alien. To navigate the challenges that we face (social, ecological, economic, philosophical), Channer argues that we need new kinds of objects: ‘They must be confidently doubtful, awkward as well as elegant, h o r i z o n t a l as well as vertical, soft as well as hard. [...]’. And while the comparison to nuclear-waste storage grimly evokes the complexity of what is often hidden behind the shiny surfaces of industrial forms, Channer decided here to explore pleasure, giving herself permission to use colour and surface in highly seductive ways. 

This brings us full circle to the billboard — whose purple luxury beckoned seductively to the artist as a child, curled like a silkworm in the back of her parents’ car — selling toxicity hidden under glamorous folds of fabric.”

Excerpt from Cigarettes, Grime and Glamour in the Work of Alice Channer by Zoë Gray. The essay was commissioned for the monographic exhibition publication Alice Channer, ed. by Kunstmuseum / Kunsthalle Appenzell, September 2023.

Similar to what we have seen in Channer’s other works, we encounter here a procedure involving a huma-nised assembly line and an alienated manufacturing process. Planetary System (Kolzer DGK63”) (2019) features a steel carousel that is normally used to aluminium-coat car headlights but is here diverted for the purpose of metallising the tactile shells of living creatures. When the carousel, known in the industry as a “planetary system”, is placed in a vacuum, the fixtures to which the crab shells are attached rotate, allowing a fine liquid metal mist to accumulate on them. The fragile brown crab shells contrast sharply with the rough, tubular construction, and yet both meld here into a single unit. The effect is to call into question the alienation inherent in industrial production, while the process itself is subjectified and becomes an integral part of the object. At the same time, the work points to ecological fragility in relation to our production-oriented consumption of environmental resources. The use of technology may well lend the fragile exoskeletons a seductive look, but they are also acutely vulnerable due to their proximity to the machine. The title Planetary System (Kolzer DGK63”) is polyphonic, summoning associations with space travel as well as visions of the natural life forms and organic bodies that share our planet, and even possible science fiction tales expressing our fascination with the technological promise of progress.

Alice Channer graduated from Goldsmiths College, London (2006), with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art and from the Royal College of Art, London (2008), with a Master’s degree in Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited at the Liverpool Biennale, UK (2021); 55th Venice Biennale, IT (2013); and Glasgow International, UK (2010). She has had institutional solo presentations at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, US (2015); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, DE (2014); Hepworth Wakefield, Yorkshire, UK (2013); Kunstverein Freiburg, DE (2013); and South London Gallery, UK (2012). She realised works in public space in Joshua Tree, CA, US (2022); the University of the West of England, UK (2021); and for Artangel, UK (2021). She has been represented in numerous group exhibitions including Kunsthalle Hamburg, DE (2022/23); the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2022); at Marta Herford, DE (2021); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2021); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2017/18); MO.CO. Panacée, Montpellier, FR (2018); Museum Kurhaus Kleve, DE (2016); Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2016); Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, LB (2015); Public Art Fund, New York, US (2015); Fridericianum, Kassel, DE (2014); Künstlerhaus Graz, AT (2014); and Tate Britain, London, UK (2012).

Publication 

On the occasion of the exhibition, a comprehensive, monographic catalogue (English / German) designed by Mathias Clottu will be published by DISTANZ Verlag with essays by Rosanna McLaughlin and Zoë Gray, an experimental text by Daisy Hildyard and an interview by Stefanie Gschwend with Alice Channer.

CURATOR

Stefanie Gschwend, director Kunstmuseum / Kunsthalle Appenzell

EXHIBITION ORGANISATION

Claudia Reeb

EXHIBITION INSTALLATION

Christian Hörler, Christian Meier, Niklaus Ulmann,
Ueli Alder, Raoul Doré, Asi Föcker, Roswitha Gobbo, Carina Kirsch

ART EDUCATION

Anna Beck-Wörner

ADMINISTRATION & EVENTS

Ursula Schmid

EXHIBITION RECEPTION & MUSEUM ATTENDANTS

Petra Baumann, Raphaela Böhi, Dominique Franke, Margrit Gmünder, Roswitha Gobbo, Carina Kirsch,
Margrit Küng, Madleina Rutishauser, Barbara Metzger, Cristina Mosti, Lilli Schreiber 

EDITORS

Kunstmuseum / Kunsthalle Appenzell

EDITING

Stefanie Gschwend

TEXT

Unless otherwise stated: Stefanie Gschwend

COURTESY

Unless otherwise stated: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie

PROOFREADING

Michaela Alex-Eibensteiner

TRANSLATION

Katja Naumann

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Data-Orbit / Michel Egger, St.Gallen

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Alice Channer, D O M E St.Gallen, Berta Fischer, Irène Geisser und / and Bernhard Mandel, Zoë Gray, Alex Gray, Ruedi Grob, Daisy Hildyard, Noël Hochuli, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen, Large Glass, Rosanna McLaughlin, Marc Ohliger, Thomas Rieger, Charlotte Schepke, Sonja Schürpf, Heinz Stamm und Leihgeber*innen, die nicht namentlich genannt werden möchten / and lenders who wish to remain anonymous

KINDLY SUPPORTED BY 

Hans und Wilma Stutz Stiftung
Goldsmiths, University of London
Konrad Fischer Galerie
Kantonales Landesbauamt Appenzell Innerrhoden
Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung