Bauer, Ilka (CAN),
Ancestral Memory

ARTIST STATEMENT

Ilka Bauer

I find it hard to describe myself as an artist because my work constantly changes. To me, that evolution – the never-ending experimentation, and the magical surprises that happen on the journey from idea to execution – is what drives my practice.

I have always loved art but spent much of my life doing other things. This includes 20 years of studying and researching biology, which took me from my native Germany to England, Wales, and ultimately to Canada where I spent years exploring boreal wetlands. I have taught biology and botany and, more recently, studied environmental policy and law before I turned my focus to artistic practice.

Now based on the coast of British Columbia, I work in both two-and three-dimensional media. My themes are informed by my life experience, with Biology, the environment, governance and identity all featuring heavily in my work.

I have a long fascination with the way lived experience plays into what we perceive as real, and past work has explored this from both a literal sense and in the context of environmental governance. More recently, I have started to examine how distorted narratives of self are constructed as a means to survive, and how they can give rise to conflict and mental illness.

I discovered paper as a three-dimensional medium in 2019 and quickly became fascinated with the material – with its texture, its potential for shape, and its inherent symbolism as a carrier of meaning. Proverbially delicate, paper has long been used to give tangible permanence to ideas. Much of my sculptural works plays off such tensions between frailty and permanence, between reality and idea. I like to juxtapose the physical record – words or images printed on paper – with the frailty of human intention, existence, and the medium itself.

https://ilkabauer.com/