File Note 31: Noëmi Lakmaier

Over a two month period Noëmi Lakmaier has been artist in residence in Camden Arts Centre’s Artists’ Studio, shifting her practice from a small studio that doubles as an office into an expansive, high ceilinged space, open to interruption from curious visitors. Lakmaier’s temporary environment requires her to assert control over both her own ways of operating and her surroundings. Such difficulties are the very conditions the artist embraces: she consistently seeks to place herself in a zone of uncertainty to be negotiated using a process of production. Lakmaier brought with her a number of items to use, refer to, refute and question: the residency has seen the arrival of boxes of bathroom tiles, inflatable balls that become soft over time and collections of pots of yellow paint —  the very specific kind used to mark out double-yellow lines along the street. Since March, the walls have gradually filled with quantitative descriptions. Each day Lakmaier has taken an image of the studio and collected arbitrary information about her own body — including what has been ingested, waking-up times, temperature and weight. Wholly irrelevant to her production, this data invites the visitor to invent correlations between personal data and artistic practice, making a wry nod to the mythical figure of the artist observable while at work.

One existing artwork has taken up residence in the temporary studio: Exercise in Losing Control that consolidates a number of Lakmaier’s concerns, highlighting humour, absurdity and a tendency towards dangerous behaviour. Based on the child’s toy the weeble — which was marketed with the slogan “weebles wobble but they don’t fall down” — it operates across the registers of object, event and documentation, taking the form of a homemade yellow sphere constructed using a blown-up ball as an armature, punctuated by three holes just large enough to push a pair of arms and a head through. When first shown in 2007 Exercise in Losing Control became a prop for an event — impossibly the artist slotted herself inside the ball, exiting only when feeling in her body started to disappear. Once Lakmaier was inserted inside the weeble it could indeed be wobbled — but acting on such an invitation comes with a set of responsibilities. The exercise, not to be repeated, sought to define the limits of the artist’s body when used as a medium that then becomes circulated through documentation and rumour — generally initiating a gasp as to how the artist possibly could have fitted into this tiny space.

Since studying the play at school, Lakmaier has always remembered the tale of the townspeople buying yellow shoes as a marker of their choice of consumption over moral conduct. Over the last two months she has been collecting pairs of shoes, which are painted yellow with road-marking paint, turning worn items into pristine-surfaced doubles. Collected together into a large sphere, the shoes stand waiting for their wearers. One pair fits Lakmaier exactly, and in a single one-off event she will try them on, perversely making both herself and the ball of yellow shoes immobile unless rolled, an action invited by the artist, yet one that few would choose to accept. 

The politics of conduct in relation to the constraints of architecture and objects are key references for Lakmaier’s work. She is fascinated by the ways individuals take control of space, investigating how power can be relinquished, taken or collaborated with. Bad architecture intrigues her — from the public buildings that require tensile barriers to guide the public through spaces, to the transport nodes that grow lines of waiting people or the homes where doors grind spaces for door handles into walls. Home improvement disasters capture her attention too, as evidenced by her ever-growing cache of DIY materials during the residency. Screws hammered into walls, shelves that fall off and tiles with misaligned perspectives, for Lakmaier, are opportunities for reasserting control over imperfect frameworks for behaviour and proposed solutions. These familiar failures that breed frustration often initiate lateral, and sometimes subversive, thinking as individuals seek ways of operating in spite of tangible and attitudinal obstacles. It is in this very space that Lakmaier situates her artistic practice.