Ellen Korth
"WALKS"

Exhibition: 17 June – 27 September 2023

Early summer 2020, in full Covid lockdown, Ellen Korth took the same walk for seven weeks, seven days a week, with her camera capturing plant life as she was going from one day to the next.

The same round. Silence. Repetition. Slowness. A dullness being anything but dull. And then back in her studio a series of repetitive actions, performed as the equivalent of a Japanese tea ceremony: printing the photos, soaking the prints, splitting the paper, ironing, crumpling, ironing them. Awagami paper, wafer-thin, becoming almost immaterial, the print a sea of subtle grays where the vegetation quite obviously simply is. Forty-nine prints, bound in seven folios, with an itinerary added stacked in a cardboard box. The delicacy of the paper forces the reader to turn the pages with utmost care, a visual meditative journey enfolding without words.

In the corresponding museum presentation, Ellen Korth has covered the floor space of a large hall with an endless handwritten repetition of the word "and", without beginning and without end. As visitors come and go, feet will wear these words out, until hardly a trace will be left – allowing us to literally read the passage of time.

From four speakers we hear Ellen Korth’s voice sing-say "and and and" in multi-layered modulations. As a Tibetan prayer wheel accompanying a film where we see her walking surrounded by nature. Black and white photos and sunny movie images sliding over one another, separating, merging, in many different ways. The landscape becoming overwhelming and she still walking, going and going and going. Plants germinating, growing, flowering, bearing fruit, and then, suddenly, cut down. What remains contains all that is gone. And all of a sudden, repeatedly, another sound: Korth folding paper, cutting, mumbling measurements. The process of creation.

"Walks" is Ellen Korth’s thirteenth art book. It took shape in collaboration with book designer Sybren Kuiper and book binder Wytze Fopma.

For her previous art books Ellen Korth received several awards. Her books have been acquired by libraries and museums in the Netherlands and other countries.