Industrienatur woz ere — luciemacgregor

Industrienatur woz ere, 2024
Ceramic, graffiti fragments in poster pulp
15 x 30 x 90cm

Install view, Muji Kudamm, Berlin

A series of sculptures that took inspiration from a broken tree planter and a fallen tree, this street-sited object was echoed into shorter ceramic segments. The separate forms here are made of human-forged clay rather than machine-produced metal and contain both Berlin and London sourced paper with pulped posters from the layered lamposts at Warschauer Straße and grafitti fragments from the crumbling walls at Mauerpark in Berlin and canals in Hackney. ‘Industrienature woz ere’ takes its title from the book ‘Curated Decay’ by Caitlin DeSilvey, with the mention of the german term ‘Industrienatur’, with its closest english translation being ‘Industrial nature’. Presented alongside a sketchbook containing collaged pulp and a hand bound book that holds photographic prints of the paper material sources, the pages of the city and unintentional collaboration brings together human strata collectively to the surface.

Commissioned by Haus des Papiers as part of Paper Future Lab 2024, the artworks are situated in the flagship Muji store in central Berlin. During the time I was making these sculptures I found an unlikely finding of the etymology of the word ‘Muji’ which translates to ‘no ground’. A humbling nod to the tree saplings that the original tree planter structure was designed to protect, the ground-extracted materials now sit here both with and without it.

A5 handbound book containing monochrome photographic prints.

Sketchbook brimming with paper pulped collage, drawings and reference images.

Industrienature woz ere, 2024

Warschauer Straße, 2024
Inkjet print, oil pastel, string, chalk, collage and carbon print on paper