Artist Eloise Hawser: the creatives who shaped her

The exciting young artist Eloise Hawser creates work that explores the emotional resonances in the electrical, mechanical and architectural infrastructure that is a part of all our lives.
 
As artist-in-residence at Somerset House Studios, she has just staged her exhibition Eloise Hawser: By the deep, by the mark, the first large-scale show from a resident artist at Somerset House. Here, she turns the spotlight on three artists whose work she particularly admires.

Rosemarie Trockel

Trockel is an influential German artist (born in 1952) working in multiple materials – from film to woven sculpture, bronze and clay. She has also used a variety of mediums, including video, collage and assemblage. She had an awe-inspiring exhibition, A Cosmos, at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2013. It was generous and abundant and included many surprising objects, including work by other artists (such as birds crafted out of found paper by the Idaho folk artist James Castle), placed alongside her own work.

Eva Hesse

The Tate’s 2002–03 Eva Hesse exhibition was an incredible retrospective of her sculpture, including her dipped latex works. Born in Germany in 1936, she lived in America and died in 1970. Hesse was part of the post-minimal art movement of the 1960s and challenged every conceivable notion of what sculpture could be. She experimented and was impossible to categorise, saying of her work: ‘The drawings could be called paintings legitimately, and a lot of my sculpture could be called paintings, and a lot of it could be called nothing – a thing or any object or any new word that you want to give it.’

Isa Genzken

My third artist is another connected to Germany. A leading figure, Genzken was born in 1948 and works in Berlin. She primarily favours sculpture and installation and uses a wide variety of materials. I saw a selection of her extraordinary pram sculptures exhibited in Münster for Sculpture Projekte Münster 07. They looked totally incongruous – petrified and windswept, as if a catastrophic event had just occurred. They were a frighteningly dystopian image of femininity.

Find out more about Eloise Hawser at eloisehawser.com
 
Somerset House Studios is a new experimental workspace at Somerset House; somersethouse.org.uk/somerset-house-studios

Photo courtesy Somerset House