From reading Gilda Williams, I understand the difference between an artist statement and a practice statement, as the artist statement tends to focus on a specific body of work, project, or exhibition, and the practice statement focuses on your entire body of work, its evolution, and its theoretical underpinnings (e.g., I would consider the ideas of Foucault, O’Doherty, Obrist, material agency).
Therefore, the artist’s statement is more accessible and less formal than a practice statement, as it often targets a broader audience, including the general public. The tone should be conversational, concise and direct. For Hotel Kalahari, it suggested exploring how the installation reflects themes of home, loss, and resilience while responding to the barn’s rural architecture and interplay of light and shadow. I consider that I need to play my role in shaping the viewers’ experience.
In Part Five, I wrote about this development in Exercise 4 (https://karenstanderart.co.za/part-five-project-3-writing-around-and-presenting-your-pracitce-statement/). Here, I developed shorter versions to be used for different situations. I also shared this with my peers/friends for comments.
Below is how my thoughts developed for the final writing:
My Artist Statement on Hotel Kalahari 2024: An Outward-Looking Archive of Care and Resilience
Hotel Kalahari 2024 is an installation that merges personal storytelling with reflections on the interwoven relationship between humanity and nature. I explore themes of home, community, connection, and the delicate balance between protection and confinement through intricately crafted wire nests. The transparent, suspended forms evoke an otherworldly environment, inviting viewers to contemplate humanity’s innate need for safety and the complex interdependence between species.
Wire as Material and Metaphor
Wire, central to my practice, serves as both medium and metaphor. Its industrial history, tied to control and division, contrasts with its potential for transformation into forms that signify care and resilience. Inspired by the sociable weaver birds’ nests, my wire creations hold traces of both personal and collective narratives. These communal and enduring nests remind us of the cooperative resilience necessary for survival—both human and avian.
In my hands, the act of weaving wire is profoundly personal. It is a way of processing grief over the loss of my youngest son to depression, an illness reflective of our time’s vulnerabilities. Each loop of wire becomes a gesture of care, a response to vulnerability, and an act of healing. As I shape the wire, I simultaneously experience the material’s resistance and flexibility, a metaphor for life’s capacity for adaptation and growth.
The Archive of Care
This installation is a collection of objects and an outward-looking archive of care. The nests I create carry the marks of my personal history while inviting viewers to engage with the broader histories embedded in the material. Wire’s colonial and industrial legacy highlights the boundaries that have historically divided societies. By reclaiming it, I aim to transform its narrative—using it not as a tool of separation but as a medium for connection.
The nests’ shadows, cast onto walls, extend the physical forms into ephemeral dimensions, creating a dialogue between presence and absence. This interplay mirrors the fragility of the themes I explore: grief, love, and community. As an archive, my work documents an ongoing inquiry into how we build, sustain, and sometimes lose the spaces of care in our lives.
Heterotopias and Survival
Drawing on the concept of ‘heterotopia,’ the nests embody spaces simultaneously practical and symbolic, familiar yet otherworldly. Inspired by the sociable weavers’ multi-chambered nests, I explore their dual function as survival sites and metaphors for human experiences of safety and restriction within spaces. These nests, built in response to the harsh extremes of the Kalahari, reflect resilience born of cooperation and care.
The nests remind us that what we construct to protect ourselves physically and emotionally can also isolate us. By weaving together personal loss with ecological narratives, my work invites viewers to reflect on their relationships with care, community, and the natural world.
An Invitation to Reflect
The repetitive, meditative process of shaping wire mirrors the communal effort of sociable weavers and the collective resilience of communities facing ecological and emotional extremes. Through this installation, I invite viewers to reflect on how we create protective spaces, both personal and collective. These nests are more than objects; they are vessels for memory, emotion, and dialogue—an outward-looking archive of humanity’s fragility and the enduring wisdom of the natural world.
OR
Hotel Kalahari 2024 is an installation combining personal storytelling with reflections on human/nature experiences through intricately crafted wire nests of different sizes and forms. Each object has transparent layers that evoke an otherworldly, suspended environment, inviting viewers to contemplate humanity’s innate need for safety and the complex interdependence between species. This work explores ideas of home, community, connection, care, and the delicate balance between protection and confinement.
The nest speaks as much to human emotions—grief, love, and the longing for community—as it does to the resilience of the sociable weaver birds. These birds’ nests remind us that human and avian survival often relies on cooperation, care, and creating shared spaces where we can thrive together.
The wire nest represents an intersection between human experience and nature’s resilience. It is deeply personal, shaped by my vulnerability and grief over losing my youngest son. Each loop of wire becomes a gesture of care, a response to loss, or a moment of resilience in vulnerability.
In creating the nests and other objects, I find myself both a caregiver and a recipient of care. The repetitive, meditative process of weaving wire helps me process complex emotions and create a space for healing. The nests carry traces of my experience as a mother: As mothers construct safe spaces for their children, I have built nests that reflect themes of care, protection, and loss. By sharing my story, I hope to offer viewers a space to reflect on the fragile balance between care and community.
The medium of the wire itself is essential to this narrative. Solid yet flexible, it allows me to form structures echoing the sociable weaver nests’ fluid, evolving architecture. Like drawing with a continuous line, shaping the wire enables me to create a visual language of strength and vulnerability.
Sociable weavers construct their nests in response to the harsh extremes of the Kalahari climate, where natural threats like fires are constant. Their communal nests serve as both physical and social buffers, underscoring the importance of cooperation, care, and resilience. My wire nests embody this dual resilience, intertwining personal themes of loss with broader themes of ecological survival.
Inspired by these multi-chambered nests from Southern Africa, I’ve drawn on the concept of ‘heterotopia’—simultaneously familiar and otherworldly spaces. These nests, practical structures for survival, embody deeper meanings of safety and restriction. I explore this duality: how what we build to protect ourselves can also create distance from the world outside.
I invite viewers to reflect on how we create protective spaces in our lives and the broader ecological world. These nests are more than physical structures; they hold emotions, questions, and an ongoing dialogue between human fragility and the endurance of the natural world.
THINKING WITH MY MATERIAL, WIRE:
In my practice, wire serves as both a material and a metaphor—a vessel for navigating the intersections of personal grief, historical narratives, and collective resilience. This seemingly rigid medium, historically associated with control and division, becomes my work’s reclamation and transformation tool.
The wire nests I create are inspired by the sociable weaver birds, whose intricate, communal structures represent resilience and care. These forms invite viewers to reflect on the delicate balance between protection and confinement, belonging and displacement. Yet for me, the act of weaving wire is also profoundly personal—a way of processing the loss of my youngest son to depression, an illness that reflects the deep vulnerabilities of our time. Each loop of wire is a moment of care, a gesture of resilience, and a response to vulnerability.
Each nest serves as an archival vessel, preserving the physical gestures of its making and the emotional and ecological stories embedded in its form. Together, they create a living archive of care and resilience where personal grief and communal survival intersect.
While my work draws deeply from personal experiences, it also engages with the broader history of the material itself. Wire, a product of the industrial and colonial past, carries a legacy of boundaries and exclusion. In reclaiming it, I seek not to erase this history but to reimagine its possibilities. Through this act of transformation, I hope to inspire questions about how we navigate and reshape the narratives of our lives.
Draft Artist Statement for Hotel Kalahari
Hotel Kalahari is an immersive sculptural installation that explores themes of community, resilience, and the fluid interplay between containment and openness. Suspended within the barn on a farm in the Riebeek Valley, South Africa, the work draws on the architecture of the sociable weaver bird’s communal nests—vast structures that provide shelter and connection in the harsh Kalahari Desert. These nests serve as both metaphor and inspiration, embodying collective ingenuity and the delicate balance between individual needs and communal care.
The installation consists of a monumental woven wire nest alongside a series of more miniature wire sculptures. These suspended forms interact dynamically with the barn’s natural light, casting intricate shadows that shift throughout the day. These shadows become integral to the work, mirroring the nests’ conceptual duality—where strength meets fragility and creation coexists with precarity. This interdependence of form and shadow invites viewers to consider how physical and metaphorical the forces around them shape spaces.
With its rustic textures and imperfections, the barn is a meaningful collaborator in this work. Its environment—marked by hay, dust, and the passage of time—contrasts with the industrial steel wire, a material historically associated with boundaries and division. By transforming this utilitarian material into delicate, transparent forms, the work subverts its conventional associations and reclaims it as a medium of care and connection. The installation thus becomes a dialogue between the man-made and the organic, blurring the boundaries between art and site and rethinking the role of exhibition spaces.
The Hotel Kalahari title reflects the sociable weaver nests’ role as communal hubs that accommodate life and nurture resilience in an unforgiving landscape. These nests resonate as symbols of survival and adaptability, mirroring the human condition. In creating the installation, I engaged in a repetitive, meditative process of weaving that mirrored the birds’ instinctual act of building. This labour-intensive practice became a personal exploration of loss and healing, transforming grief into something hopeful and generative.
The installation also invites broader questions about how we inhabit and share spaces. How do natural and human-made structures shape our understanding of community and care? What narratives can we reclaim from materials like wire, traditionally used to separate and confine? In this context, Hotel Kalahari is not only an homage to resilience but also an invitation to reconsider how art can create spaces of connection and reflection.
This exhibition marks a pivotal moment in my practice as I explore how art interacts with its surroundings. The barn was not merely a venue but an active participant, shaping how the work was experienced. I envision adapting Hotel Kalahari for new contexts, including outdoor installations or gallery spaces, each offering unique dialogues between the work, its site, and its audience. Through this interplay of space, light, and material, I hope to continue weaving connections between art, environment and shared humanity.
Short notes before the final statement: I must ensure that if someone were reading this statement without seeing the work, would they have a sense of what it is physically? I will include ideas around Foucault; it might be helpful, mainly when presenting this statement to a curator or gallery.
PRACTICE STATEMENT
(Written after the exhibition and feedback from peers and visitors. I later reviewed it after my last tutorial in early December 2024, when I added more detail around the work’s scale and the ideas of Heterotopias. I was now more aware that this statement could be sent to a curator who has never seen my work)
Karen Stander makes large-scale sculptures from woven wire that form spaces that speak to the nest’s form. Through this work, her artistic practice delves into the intersections of care, resilience, and the narratives woven into materials. From her studio in the Riebeek Valley, South Africa, she reflects on the human condition, community, and our interconnectedness with nature. Inspired by the intricate communal nests of sociable weaver birds, her wire sculptures explore themes of belonging, vulnerability, and the balance between protection and constraint.
The nests created by sociable weavers, feats of collective engineering, offer safety and warmth in the harsh Kalahari Desert. Stander’s sculptures echo this communal ingenuity while transforming industrial steel wire—historically associated with control, division, and utility—into symbols of care and connection. Her use of wire subverts its conventional associations, reclaiming it as a medium of creation and resilience. This transformation speaks to the duality of strength and fragility, amplifying the tension between its history as a containment tool and its potential to foster connection. Works such as Hotel Kalahari, a wire nest sculpture over two meters tall and weighing approximately 30 kilograms, exemplify her process’s monumental effort and physicality. The imposing size of the piece evokes the architectural ambition of sociable weaver nests, among the most significant bird-built structures in the world.
At its core, Stander’s work is deeply personal. Following the loss of her youngest son to depression, she turned to the repetitive act of weaving and shaping wire as a meditative process to navigate grief. Each loop of wire embodies care and intention, transforming pain into something hopeful and meaningful. This process underscores the resilience inherent in both material and maker, highlighting the power of creating in the face of loss. The fragile and robust nests become metaphors for survival and interconnectedness, speaking to the human capacity to hold and nurture even amidst adversity.
Drawing on the concept of ‘heterotopia,’ the nests embody spaces simultaneously practical and symbolic, familiar yet otherworldly. Inspired by the sociable weavers’ multi-chambered nests, she explores their dual function as survival sites and metaphors for human experiences of safety and restriction. These nests, built in response to the harsh extremes of the Kalahari, reflect resilience born of cooperation and care. The nests remind us that what we construct to protect ourselves physically and emotionally can also isolate us. By weaving together personal loss with ecological narratives, my work invites viewers to reflect on their relationships with care, community, and the natural world.
Beyond personal reflection, Stander’s work resonates with broader societal concerns, such as the ecological and social resilience required in the face of crises. Her sculptures challenge viewers to reconsider the histories and possibilities embedded in materials: How do objects and narratives shape our identities? How can we reclaim spaces of division and turn them into places of care? The transparent forms of her nests, which interact dynamically with light and shadow, further emphasize the contrast between openness and containment. The interplay of shadow and light extends the sculptures’ meanings, inviting contemplation on the fluidity of human emotions and experiences.
Stander’s practice also emphasizes community engagement. Feedback from exhibitions has shown that her work resonates with audiences navigating themes of loss and care, fostering shared emotional reflections. This dialogue has encouraged her to explore the potential of her art to create collective healing experiences. Recent projects, including a steel wing sculpture for indoor and outdoor installations and interactive art-making workshops with an NGO, highlight her commitment to bridging personal expression and communal connection.
Her suspended wire nests are not merely objects of beauty but invitations to reflect on shared humanity and interconnectedness. Through her practice, she challenges traditional narratives, reimagines historical materials, and creates physical and metaphorical spaces that nurture dialogue, hope, and healing.
2/ Something about the scale of the works could be a helpful addition. If someone were
reading your statement without being able to see the work, would they have a sense of
what it is physically?
3/ There is no mention of Foucault? This might be useful to include, particularly when
presenting your statement to a curator or a gallery, for example.