I received a Kendama, a Japanese cup-and-ball game, and took it with me into the mountains of Saxony Switzerland, along the routes where many Romantic painters of the 18th and 19th centuries once wandered. I began learning the toy, awkwardly, using my non-dominant hand, while filming myself against vast landscapes. 

“I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full … I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am.”
— Caspar David Friedrich

The work plays with themes present in Romantic art; individuation, authenticity, and the idea of nature as a source of self-discovery. I don’t reject these entirely, in fact my own search for identity is part of why I make art, but here I gently make fun of this impulse, while simultaneously living it out.

The resulting images are intended to be at once impressive and humble, dubious even. Filming along tourist routes instead of painting removes much of the craft that once mediated these encounters. Mountains, clouds and trees become readymade backdrops, easy enough to frame, record, and almost claim. In the videos, the amplified click of the wooden Kendama cuts through the silence of the sublime, making effort, repetition and failure audible from afar. The resulting gesture is neither reverent nor completely ironic, but tentative and unresolved, staying with the act of trying rather than arriving at some kind of ultimate insight.

Video Samples

Monument

Notes and Links

¬ Created with the support of the Sonic Confession residency by OutsideininsideoutinsideoutoutsideiN collective.

¬ Exhibited at Gallery Torhaus, Stadt Wehlen and Slug Gallery, Leipzig.