Press release

In Rings of Saturn, Sebald evokes a narrative of memorialisation, remembrance and historical imagination. He uncovers the past in existing sign posts—desolate buildings and derelict pagodas, unused railroad tracks, once thriving ports in Southeastern England now abandoned and returned to nature, under thickets of forests or “below the sea, beneath alluvial sand and grave.” What no longer exists, Sebald imagines on the landscape based on his research. Far from a modern flaneur, the author possesses a keen eye and voice of an amateur documentarian, spinning stories imprinted and observed in the abstract shapes of the environment, into mythologies steeped in the lost and forgotten. Past and present collapse and flatten, and history appears as contemporary.
 

For his first solo exhibition at Project Native Informant - Went to Country - Sturla has produced three wall sculptures, stemming from what could be imagined as a single source, as if they are cut, dismembered, unbolted or in a state of repair. Each work appears to be viewed through the lens of a post-mortem, displaying contents of a metaphorical belly - an exhausted landscape of a body: bolts akin to medical pins, portholes resembling fistulas. Side structures point to the surgically cut innards that track the geography around a quarry, diving deeper into the internal bowels that make up a clay cavern.

The term ‘went to country’ comes from the area known as clay country, St Austall, where large amounts of china clay have been mined for generations, drastically changing the landscape and the surrounding communities. On rainy days, mined clay deposits would overflow, staining the rivers and the landscape with the runoff. The clay has seemingly returned back to its source, a push and pull, a cycle loop, of the past and the present, of process and material, of object hood and the self.