Installation of Extrasolar, 14 m, spanning the height of Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium in Norway. Part of Girl Meets Girl curated by Paul Carey-Kent, Jinhee Choi, Sunhee Choi and Jari Lager.

Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium is an art center that exhibits contemporary art by Norwegian as well as international artists.

Cyanotype on silk, 14 m, 2022.

“The delicate silks soaring from bottom to top of the staircase are cyanotypes derived from technical drawings of spacecraft – appropriately enough, as the process was the go-to 19th century means of producing copies of engineering and architectural plans, termed ‘blueprints’. That brings to mind the comparable contrast between the protective hardware of the spacecraft and the vulnerability of astronauts as they travel into the deep blue. Mahieux Bartoli immerses bolts of chiffon and organza in photosensitive solution, places multiple templates made from the blueprints onto the silk, and leaves the sun to turn the uncovered zones blue. The resulting intricately criss-crossing marks have an abstract quality which exploits variations in focus and exposure, but they also cohere into the massive yet weightless form of complicated spaceships. As Mahieux Bartoli explains, ‘the process of transformation from idea to sign to object (the process of inception to blueprint to material product) is a mechanism of inverted abstraction (object to sign to idea)’.”

Extract from the exhibition catalogue, words by Paul Carey-Kent.