A comment that Malena Bergmann’s students at the University at North Carolina in Charlotte often make is that she “thinks outside the box” more than anyone they’ve ever known.
As an artist and educator, Bergmann explores the link between art and ceremony. In her work, which includes what she calls “Kinetic,” “Static,” and “Film” pieces, she creates works that unfold according to the rhythms of place, space, intention, and circumstance. She courts risk. She explores what happens when an artist lets go of control.
A recent and ongoing project of ephemeral artworks is “Tailings: Whispers for the Forest.” To create these works, Bergmann, who is also a member of RadJoy Community, works with alphabet stamps, nontoxic ink, and her own blood to stamp questions for the forest itself onto organic surfaces. In the work pictured above, created in a stream in North Carolina, she stamped ink and blood onto black walnuts to query, “Dare we rise, in surrender, in rustling, in bloom?” In another work, she stamped the saber-like blades of a South Carolina sable palmetto with fragments of the question, “Will we stagger with the weight of the ways we change each other?”
The questions themselves are as provocative as Zen koans. How astonishing it would be to come upon them in the forest. But, whereas most artists dream of posterity for themselves and their art, these offerings, says Bergmann, “will last only as long as the next rainfall.”