Helen Mirra Emerson, 2006 Pallet wood and pine cone 17 x 65 x 15 cm Helen Mirra (1970-) is an artist who lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In an intention to explore the daily relationships between nature and the people that inhabit it, Mirra creates works in the form of sound, film, photography, fabric, text, and installations that respectively reference a wide range of concerns from history, science, and aesthetics. The exhibited works “Mittel” (2006) and “Emerson” (2006) were created in Berlin during Mirra’s participation in the artist-in-residence program supported by DAAD. Mirra had resided in a studio located next to the forest area of Grunewald that extends to the west of Berlin. These sculptural works are produced through combining, scrap materials from pallets that the artist gathered from the street in front of her studio, and the pinecones found in the forest. Mirra’s manual method of production represents her political conscience, and the works conceived in this manner constantly display the presence of materials obvious in origin within the contours of their form. Such materials also serve as criterions for decisions made by the artist during the process of production. The appearance of the original material is altered, decontextualized, and is lead to harbor an abstract and poetic quality.
