Liane Lang, Deep time dip

Butler Gallery, in association with Kilkenny Arts Festival, is pleased to present Deep Time Dip by Liane Lang, a German-born, London-based visual artist who explores time and memory through monuments and historic landscape in her mixed-media practice.

Lang approaches this history with an eye to deep time and constant change. As we prepare for the cataclysmic changes we must now make globally in how things are made and done, the combination of material fascination and storytelling compels us to contemplate our actions in the landscape differently. Lang explores a unique space between sculpture and photography, drawing together a material, tactile experience alongside the narrative and time-related language of photography. This process is realised through an emphasis on physicality, both in Lang’s images and in the unexpected and often fragmented surfaces she prints onto like cement, tarmac, marble, lead or tree bark.

Many of the works have a human presence, glimpsed through a tree or behind a boulder. The figure is allowed to occupy, commune with and touch the world, a fleeting moment of ecstatic existence, joyous and immersive. The figure is also there as a contemplation of the memorial object, bodies and casts, like fragments of statuary. The statue is always literal, a gesture to a distant future: I was here, once lithe and lovely.[i]

In this exhibition, Deep Time Dip, Lang’s first exhibition in Ireland, threads of her practice are introduced through several past bodies of work. These include a selection of her photographic work that focuses on cultural monuments and on finding ways to reconnect with their narratives. In her Monumental Misconceptions photographic series, we witness the artist intervene and respond in a performative way to heroic bombastic sculptures, discovered during her residency at the Memento Sculpture Park in Budapest, the resting place of discarded and exiled monumental sculptural works from the socialist era in Hungary. Lang’s Glorious Oblivion photographic series looks specifically at monuments to women in order to examine their place in our collective history.

In these images Lang photographs mannequins – a humbler form of the statue – in contact with monuments, as if reaching beyond their cold formality to establish new physical connections with the past.[ii]

Touch Stone, Lang’s most recent body of work, reflects upon human industry and activity in the landscape and emphasises her strong bond to materiality in her thinking and in the realisation of her work. Lang elucidates:

Stones, from the gorgeous glass-like crystal slices to the broken Carrara marble headstones, the limestone quarry debris to the Neolithic stone circle, collate a sense of geology that can encompass all the ways we rely on its strength and symbolism. Different uses of stone have shared characteristics but differing intentions, similar activities with radically different outcomes; gaps I try to reflect in the work. The ecologically unsound surface depicts the re-wilded or re-natured subject, the cement factory, the chunk of road, the collapsed mine, the Holloway. Wood and concrete, iron and tarmac, lead, cotton and silk, form ligaments that hold together a multitude of experiences, invention and subjugation, improvement and destruction, beauty and death.[iii]

In addition to this important body of sculptural and photographic works, a selection of past video works by Lang (2010-2023) plays in our Digital Gallery. They have to be seen as they beautifully illustrate the full breadth and range of this extraordinary artist and her fascinating practice.