Soil I Sky I Skin: Featuring the Works of Two Former Bad Award Winners

Former BAD award winners Xandra van der Eijk (2017) and Cecilia (2016) reveal the versatility of iron in the exhibition Soil I Sky I Skin. Guest-curator Angelique Spaninks from MU, selected works by designers and artists who extract ferrous elements from the air and the soil on a small scale, distil these from our bodies or drape them, like a second skin, around us.

Xandra van der Eijk shows two projects in the Soil I Sky I Skin exhibition. In Contain, Corrode she zooms in on the water network that is usually hidden from our view and has been one of the most basic human infrastructures for centuries. In the foreseeable future, the old iron water pipes will become a thing of the past, until artefacts are destroyed. Contain, Corrode is such an artifact, an old cast-iron water pipe in decay, an object in which human ingenuity, material transformation, the all-consuming time and the bacterial life come together. In As Above So Below Xandra, together with Kristie van Noort, collects star dust that descends on Earth from the universe. Micrometeorites are sought by scientists on a small scale as a source of information about the history of the universe and the composition of the stars. Xandra and Kirstie consider these micrometeorites as a material for the first time, an alien rare earth metal that they collect as futuristic urban miners. Cecilia Jonsson has a fascination for iron at the molecular level. She looks for it in living material from grass to blood. Cecilia Jonsson harvested 24 kilos of the wild grass species Imperata cylindrica, an iron absorbent plant. She won 2 grams of iron ore from the roots in the metal contaminated grass on the deserted banks of a Spanish mine. Enough to forge The Iron Ring. Herewith she outlines a scenario for iron extraction that can contribute to the rehabilitation of abandoned metal mines instead of further destruction of the landscape. In Ferrotopia you can see the film she made of the process.