Alchemical Expedition
Belinda Grace Gardener

It all begins with a map, or perhaps a playing card. The one gives the wildernesses and expanses of the world a pictorial order and brings within easy reach distant, impassable terrain, making it accessible. The other lends the imponderables of fortune symbolic shape, letting ephemeral chance appear fleetingly graspable, formable. Both, map and playing card, are metaphors of the human will to mould and to master place and destiny, to succeed in the game of life as a winner. The deeper dimensions inherent in these and other everyday systems of imagery and meaning are precisely what Hamburg artist Sabine Mohr focuses upon in her work. As an ethnographer addressing her own and other environments (she visited France, for example, a number of times to work on projects, journeyed to China, India, Asia, Sicily, and the United States) and proceeding with a poetic eye, she recognizes in marginal phenomena the signs that refer to the larger picture, the underlying, more extensive layers, the transcultural and transhistorical interconnections. In her conceptual aesthetic method she unites the associative logic of dreams and the deductive combinatorial rules of science, the immediate proximity to life of the field researcher and the magical, at times surreal transformative power of the alchemist.

In her paradox procedure, oscillating between concretization, on the one hand, and abstraction, on the other, the extraction and dislocation of the subjects which she is pursuing plays an equally decisive role as their transposition into materials, which in turn enter a relationship to the given spatial context and function as vehicles for conveying content and mood. Comparable to a grain of sand which viewed through an electron microscope mutates into a crystalline,
non-recognizable alien element, while at the same time revealing its actual, otherwise invisible composition, Sabine MohrÕs de- and recontextualized sujets derived from the current of everyday life open up surprising perspectives: in this case it is the lens of the artistic transformation/shift which discloses the unfamiliar in the familiar, the concealed, overlooked nature of things.

The field in which the artist performs cannot be reduced to simple thematic specifications. Yet still in a broader sense a tendency is noticeable to stylizations which manifest themselves in the form of ornamental patterns (for example the reverse side of playing cards, the camouflage design on a Russian cigarette pack), topographical or other methods of measurement and surveying (in maps, for instance) and further systematic/schematic representations. They create the syntactic raw material, so to speak, for a semantic extension and sophistication, which releases the sub-structural, historical potential of the objects of examination and simultaneously offers a prospect of their possible Š utopian Š scope.

In Sabine MohrÕs more recent works a map from the 19th century, which the artist found in an antiquarian French encyclopedia, reoccurs as a leitmotif. This map is already a symbolic representation, more precisely, a piece of fiction, as it displays an imaginary world landscape Š a constructed, synthetic composition comprised of all the geographical phenomena on earth: ocean, island, dune, coast, plain, valley, riverbed, desert, oasis, mountain range, plateau, and other lexically manifestations of nature. This world landscape, free of territorial and national boundaries (the respective forms of landscape are supplied with the according terms, like names of countries) served the artist as a source for various projects, among those an extensive work in the context of the Hamburg 

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