Lines Fiction: Your art is an expression of transitions, of metaphoric processes, you work in different media – drawing, object installation, and film.

Sandra Boeschenstein: Yes, the drift of meaning is central. Therefore drawing in its medial pureness is most suitable. Lines exist without ballast and they are versatile, changing the system without rupture is their strength. From the same stroke I can form binoculars or eye flows, a talking mouth or a word. For me drawing stands for availability witout arrogance, and for greatness without monumentality. The relative extent – for example of a drawn globe – only gets its dimensions in the eye of the beholder. As a line it is only an offer for someone’s imagination.
The magnitude of the question and the respective scope of work decide upon the choice of format and technique. With smaller formats I wander around in the heating subject matter, approaching my idea sheet for sheet from different angles and distances. In case of a whole cascade of imagination in waiting, I take my sketchbook to reduce the abundance of imagery while increasing the depth of information. I turn towards big formats when I presume that more will become visible in an extended format, and that in a long work process an atmospheric approach can be disclosed. Or I’m involved for a year in reflecting on a huge question, like the relationship between reality and probability, and a whole series of many sheets emerges. The aspect of installation arises in situ, in reaction to a specific space, if I’m drawing directly on the wall or if I’m extending my drawings into the space together with objects in an installation. As an example I included my work entitled “Vor vier Minuten” (“Four minutes ago”).
My special emphasis goes to the unclear border of percipience and thinking, and I prefer to start from a simple medial base to watch the mental movement of a presumptuous huge question instantaneously.

Lines Fiction: Your film clip is pretty out of the ordinary on Lines Fiction. You were filming an animal from the family of nematomorpha, a wriggling horse hair worm. On this website we combined this film with drawings that you chose for their associative imagery, connecting the twisting worm with lines and waterhoses in your drawings. Does this reflect an orientation towards surrealism?

Sandra Boeschenstein: In my eyes this combination of drawing and film reflects my central interest in the constitution of reality. Precisely because I take it so seriously with questioning and analyzing the conception of reality, I am very skeptical about the use of the term “surreal”. In a medial heterogeneous reality, discontinouity and displacement belongs to the structure of our daily experience. I therefore think that the difference between real and surreal becomes obsolete, facing the lack of stable references in reality. I prefer emphasizing the relationship of the real and the potential, for this pair can better be linked to the term responsibility, which is my concern. As it seems to me, the ever fresh and dynamic combination of reality defined by different sources is the main challenge today. Also the line without reference is not connected to a specific reality, but chooses it ever anew. The past and the presence, the real and the potential can be combined in one drawing. I target on putting things in relation, and I draw to see. Not with regard to a steady meaning, but in readiness for a shift in signification.
Also in this selection of drawings on Lines Fiction, my interest in shifts, and the search for the relationship of “standing for” and “being” is ditinctive:
a drawing draftswoman that heats the line for the act of drawing, a line as a waterhose that winds around “literature”; deadlines wanting to be reanimated, dreaming of their place of action as travel route or nude drawing. Finally, in the film I claim that an animal is a line, which usually happens the other way around.
Coming back to “visited line on granite”: The combination of simplicity in the concept with the uncernity of scale and the nature of this white line stirs my fascination. I found this horse worm in the Alps, trying to fix the water catchment of the cottage after a storm. I wished this animal to be a visited line, and looking for potential visitors I found a nest of firebugs in a dried chesnut leaf that I placed right outside of the focus. Granite, horse worm, nest of firebugs, and fly had their living environment in a radius of one hundred meters. My assistance was it to bring them together for an hour. I focused my camera, and breathed on the lense to create an atmosphere of depth.
I love to state in the title that we see a “visited line on granite”. Like “stamped oil paint on paper” – one description is a title, the other an indication of the technique used. These are the twists that please me – as if a silent draft raises surprise from the things that are taken for granted.

Lines Fiction: “No animals were harmed in the making of this movie”, right?

Sandra Boeschenstein: For sure! After filming the horse worm for an hour on a damp granite slab I put it back to its original granite slab beside the spring, and also the firebugs in their chesnut leaf were brought back to where they came from. The fly that participated of its own free will in the casting always came back for I sugared the granite…