“Dinge in die Welt finden” – an experiment as scenic installation

My meaning of life is: get up in the morning to find a way to continue the experiment! My life experiment is the artistic work that explains the world to me.
I encounter the world with my everyday materials. I examine the worn clothes for their traces of life; the skins that clothe us. These clothes are made of threads; many threads become a fabric.

Since humans are not thrown into the world by accident, but are born by humans into a pre-existing human world, we are like threads that are beaten into a pre-existing pattern, altering the fabric as they in turn uniquely afflict all threads of life with which they come into contact within the fabric. (bring about a condition in a being). Once the threads are spun to completion, they again yield clearly recognizable patterns, or can be told as life stories. (Hannah Arendt)

The everyday materials I use can also be wallpaper onto which I sew drawings with a sewing machine. Sometimes I combine both the sculptures and the sewing drawings with photography; especially analog b/w photography. My collage technique gives the world of thought the space to look behind the visible, which is perhaps only the ‘normal of the everyday’, after all. The observations of the conditions of life, of the ‘self-exploration’ are connected with the metaphor of the thread of life, which wants to hold together and reflect human life.
Carola Willbrand, March 2015

Vita:
Born 1952 in Cologne, lives and works in Schladern (Sieg).

grew up with art from the environment of the Rhenish Expressionists of my aunt, Käthe Schmitz-Imhoff, the first woman to study with Heinrich Nauen at the Düsseldorf Academy; trained in professions not related to art
Exhibition activity since 1981, in which the thread as a metaphor for the thread of life on papers, upholstery fabrics, wallpaper, textiles, (materials of daily use) or b/w photos, forms the supporting element.
The thread draws with the sewing machine; holds together artist books and sculptures made from worn clothing.

Awards & Prizes
2003 Prize of the Federal Republic of Germany for the sewing drawings presented by the Federal Government Commissioner for the Affairs of Disabled Persons
2004 six-month scholarship from the state of Schleswig Holstein for the Künstlerhaus Eckernförde
2005 Lectureship at the University of Education Ludwigsburg, Faculty of Special Education Reutlingen
2005 Praxiteles-scholarship of the KAOS Kunst-Film- und Video-Archiv e. V. on the Datça- Peninsula, Turkey
2008 Prize of the Mayor of the City of Halle for the portraits of the old women of Datça in connection with the Great Art Exhibition Halle an der Saale, catalog
2014 Prize of the Jakob Eschweiler Foundation