A Stitch in Time

Soltau, a German photographer (b. 1946), has only recently been recognized as an important artist and still is, for the most part, only famous in the German speaking world. Her photographs, like the work of many feminist artists, deal with a particularly female experience of the body (see Kiki Smith). However, Soltau’s work is not only about a visceral subject -- it evokes a visceral reaction.

Her art literally ties together the generations of women in her family. She breaks apart, by hand, naked photographs of her daughter, mother, grandmother and great-grand mother.
Then she stitches them back together with heavy black thread. The results are freakish -- Siamese twins and triplets, ripped and stitched together as if by a dyslexic Dr. Frankenstein. Sometimes she manipulates the photos in a computer to give the edges and background a post-apocalyptic, radioactive glow.

Her work zigs and zags on that fertile edge of the chromosome: at times she appears to celebrate the physical creativity and evolution of her female family, at times she appears frightened of the strange mutations femininity can bare. Her daughter’s body, taken apart and reconstructed in “Puberty” has two adolescent female bodies festooned with huge, oddly gapping mouths.
A bizarrely shaped breast hangs between the two stitched together forms. Soltau often digitally duplicates body parts (giving the impression of a person cut into mirrored halves, or thirds) before the stitching process, so that legs, arms and faces condense into floating fleshy creatures. The breast is one such creature. Although obviously derived from human parts, it becomes its own form of life. The huge mouths at the center of the girls’ bodies and the target-like breast are quite suggestive. Soltau sees puberty as a rite of passage, a time when one is broken apart and put back together, and also as a great hunger, a time when desires dominate the body.

Soltau’s early work did not involve breaking and stitching, which she now says is absolutely necessary. Without the action of ripping and sewing, the art feels empty to her. But it was not always thus. She was active in the early 80’s in an artistic movement that centered around women’s experience of pregnancy and abortion. This was and continues to be an important issue in Germany, as abortion is outlawed. Soltau’s work for this exhibit centered on her experience of pregnancy, and how she felt ripped and transformed by it, in a frightening as well as affirming way.

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