On the surface of coarse lines and boundaries Ellen Sylvarnes begins her artistic gesture to span an area that extends far; memories, smells, sounds, spherical shapes, between contour and materiality, the immanent processes of change are the Everything I found and Endured. The phrase Everything I found and Endured includes a current and backward glance, a poetic metaphor with time as a means of change and process. Ellen Sylvarnes’ gesture of a poetic attitude toward time is appreciable. Reversals and overlaps lead the eye to the bottles and then to opaque objects and paintings to a slower rhythm of vision. The necessary items like bottles or balls, which mark the space as a flat volume, lose their material status and thus create their purely objective function – a permanent oscillation between symbolic and poetic energy.

   Our distance and the simultaneous imperceptible longing for closeness are evident in the transformation of materials and manipulation of objects. The rhythmic sounds of the ocean, the breakwaters and the subsidence of the sea are in a sealed aluminum box and apparently audible only through headphones, the sense of presences and timelessness reflects accurately the boundary line again that Ellen Sylvarnes carries out in all her works. (Soundings 2008)

      Ellen Sylvarnes’ position as a contemporary artist can be understood in a sense with the wall installation With My Ear To The Ground, which is the precious material of woven silk illuminated in a range of contexts and traditions. Clothing covers the body, hiding it from view and protects it from heat and cold and is always a product of economic conditions. The silk Road between Europe and Asia, women’s hands operating the loom and the artist colored body imprints on carefully folded panels, along with a variety of art- historical references to Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys stretch the border lines of time, definitions and rules, without losing any substantive contours.

       Ellen Sylvarnes opens and expands mental maps, in which she points with a graphic gesture to the ephemeral intermediate ranges of opposites: essence and semblance, color and materiality, nearness and distance, usability and transience all lined up in all its diversity and rich in contrast to form a line, a timeline of life which can be understood as the process of Everything I found and Endured. The questions of possession, ownership and use are indicated and the tense relationship between duration and mortality are raised further: the borders curve at the rare state of drawing near.

Excerpt from an essay by Birgit Szepanski

Berlin 2009