Underground (2012)
MIXED TECHNIQUE
In her work, Sofie Muller descends into the deepest and darkest caverns of the human psyche, where dreams, haunting memories, traumas and the core of human identity lie buried. Underground, a mining room with bronze children's feet protruding from walls of charcoal, is in this sense a disconcerting metaphor. The installation joins other works from the same period in which Muller uses motifs such as fire, smoke and charring to externalize all-consuming suffering and expose or accentuate scars. These so-called “smoke drawings” and “fire images” include Barbara, a video in which a nineteenth-century statue of the miners' patron saint is consumed by fire, as is Brandt, the image of a boy whose blackened head leaves streaks of soot on a wall. Underground is in a similar way dark and revealing, painful and therapeutic: a lamp casts a soft light on repressed pain and lost innocence.