Moving a seam ripper into the Boring Billion

Brigitte Louter is a visual artist based in Amsterdam working across sculpture, drawing and installation. Her work draws attention to animals, phenomena and systems that often go unnoticed. ‘Moving a seam ripper into the Boring Billion’ is her first solo exhibition at Madé van Krimpen.

The exhibition brings together works from series of ‘binders’ and ‘bellows’. These works focus on components that bend and flex to accommodate more rigid parts. Together the sculptures and drawings explore animals, phenomena and systems that are often overlooked. Ranging from microscopic organisms adapting to survive, to the period in Earth’s history known as the Boring Billion. A time when microbial life covered the Earth in vast layered communities.

The ‘binders’ are based on the familiar form of a ring binder, but invert its logic. They start from pencil drawings on tracing paper that are perforated following subjective, intuitive criteria. The metal brackets and covers are then shaped to these perforations and create a ring binder that could only hold this specific drawing. 

The ‘bellows’ are based on the form and function of industrial folding bellows that protect moving machine parts. In the sculptures titled ‘Daphnia bellows’ and ‘Fruit Fly bellows’ spaces are opened to think about two animals that are rarely considered outside of their possible use or nuisance for humans. The Daphnia, a small crustacean commonly called water flea, and the fruit fly, or Drosophila. Images about the size of a human fingernail are incorporated into the layers of the works, most of them hardly visible.

In ‘Fruit Fly bellows’ the images show various fruit-fly traps as viewed from the right side, which is the rear end of the fruit fly in the sculpture. Looking in from the left side, or the side of the fruit fly brain, machine parts corresponding to the function of the fruit fly organs can be seen. The fruit fly brain is the most extensively mapped animal brain. An interactive website with a complete map of the neural connections was made for any human to browse in an attempt to understand which neurons are active during specific behaviors, like special courtship habits. Fruit flies serenade each other by vibrating their wings rapidly to create complex songs of hums and chirps. These songs however, can’t be heard by the human ear in their original form, and arguably, never felt or understood as intended by the fruit fly. The textile that envelops and protects the space of the sculpture carries a life-size image of an Alocasia leaf.

In ‘Boring Billion bellows’ the flexible bellows wraps around a ceramic event that bulges out of it like a hernia. A short text about a 1.4-billion-year-old air bubble that was destroyed so the ancient atmosphere could be analyzed is spoken into the object. The sculpture being an object about a time period, the relation between space and time naturally creates a set of problems and speculative solutions for the sculpture.