Stella Pfeiffer
Title: Orchids bloom in the garden of stones
Medium: Photografie and Transfer printing
Size: 21 x 29cm
Price: 1500 EUR
For the work “Orchids bloom in the garden of stones”, I playfully composed a selection of motifs from my photo archive in a photomontage. These motifs symbolise areas of life from my childhood. Flowers, dandelions, animals, drawings and a teddy bear. A dense, colourful, dreamlike world unfolds.
A teddy bear stands at the centre as the epitome of childhood. The industrially produced stuffed animal is combined with real flowers and animals. The individual subjects overlap and are used repetitively in different proportions and relationships. Different pictorial spaces and temporal levels are created. The colourful, detailed world takes on a surreal character and the meaning levels of the motifs change. The childlike world is given fractures.
Photographs serve us as individual as well as collective archives of memory. Our memory contains always personal and collective parts. It changes in the course of life with our experiences. Remembering is therefore imprecise and not chronological. This work also tells of this in that there are inaccuracies in it. The teddy bear is photographed out of focus. The extraction of the pictorial motifs of their initial pictorial context is imprecise. The repetition of them multiplies the imprecisions. The matrix is thus imprecise in nature. By transferring the work onto the cotton fabric by transfer printing, further random inaccuracies arise. The image eludes the viewer several times on the level of reception. What is remembered is perceived as blurred through a veil, whereby individual elements can emerge more clearly because they have a new weighting.
My main working medium is drawing. But I also work with colours, mainly in mixed techniques and different printing techniques. Recently also work with installation.
I am inspired by nature. I am fascinated by landscapes, the sky, mountains, rock formations and simple stones and, of course, many other things I find and see in my environment. For several years I have been working with simple stones and with them, I have worked out different work cyrcles, on which I continue to work, develop and expand continuously.
I often work in small formats, process-oriented and associative. During the creative process, memories of what I have seen, experiences, imagination and fantasy play an important role in the creation of images. I do not work figuratively, but abstractly. I do not make sketches or studies. Each work is created on the picture carrier from the respective moment.
My drawings are characterized by tension-filled moments of movement, in which the most diverse forces manifest themselves in fragile equilibria: In terms of content, I deal with the sensual perception of reality, which is constantly changing and cannot be captured. The perception is always fragmentary, although the senses think they can recognize a whole. The “world” and that which I, as a draftswoman, perceive from it, translate into pictures and make visible, is thus a moving space-time structure on the picture carrier, which enables new, individual references and resonance spaces, i.e. extensive fields of association for the viewer.
I never do the same thing too often. In the course of time I have developed different visual languages and my artistic work is characterized by a wide range of diversity. My artistic work is influenced by surrealism, naive art and abstract expressionism.