All those things left behind, for now

If I were a sculptress, I would be like Kiki Smith.
My subject matter would revolve around the female form,
and I would use my own body as a model to create things.
I would cast the body in various materials like bronze, iron,
and sometimes beeswax, clay and horse hair.
I would make prints, etchings and lithographs,
also watercolors, photography, and textile.
My subjects would include anatomy, animals, the cosmos, and nature.
I would portray wolves, birds, deer,
and figures emerging from animals.
Pieces would blend human and animal bodies creating new mythologies.
I would use scientific anatomical renderings,
also folklore, myth, and my own symbolic language.
I would draw inspiration from the natural world,
and make things in service of the fragility and resilience of life.
Pieces would describe the inside of the body;
casts of reproductive organs,
a bronze sacrum, a glass stomach, bowls of organs,
sketches of breasts, orifices and nervous system,
beads for fluids like blood, urine, tears, and semen.
I would make use of fragile materials like
handmade paper, doilies, ceramic, plaster, terra cotta, and paper mâché.
I would think everything body;
inside and outside,
flesh and story,
parts and whole.

Hana Lee Erdman is a dancer and choreographer who lives in Stockholm and Berlin. She moved to Europe in 2007 and has since worked freely between the genres of dance, music and visual art.

Orienting her work towards notions of companionship, she explores connections between the dancing body, energy patterns and consciousness, as well as our relationship to environment, and more than human creatures. Her work is presented in a variety of contexts and formats; in galleries, forests, churches, on stages, in publications and recordings.

MATILDA BILBERG / ALL THOSE THINGS LEFT BEHIND

BY HANA LEE ERDMAN