Transcending any single medium or mode of production, Kris Lemsalu’s eclectic work incorporates disparate elements from performance, found objects, and hand crafted works. Her multimedia productions display the artist’s acute attention to detail, as her slight alterations and manipulations cause her anthropomorphic amalgamations to undergo sometimes comic, sometimes lumpen metamorphoses. Including materials such as animal pelts, clothing, food stuffs, and porcelain body parts, Lemsalu’s blurring of the world of humans with the bestial realm of nature interjects distinct feminist overtones into the discussion of art and biological production.

A methodology that embraces the hand coloring of distinctly domestic products such as porcelain, textiles, and soft plastics, the large palate of colors applied together in muted iterations on the found and handmade materials are probably most reminiscent of the run off following tie-dye process or years of corrosion from oxidation. It is in this paradigm of vibrant transformation and imminent decay that the young artist’s work exists so clearly between the the tensions of gender politics, craftwork and art production, industry and nature, and a forced ideal of femininity that deprives women of their subjectivity.

Kris Lemsalu (b 1985 Estonia) is an emerging artist based in Tallinn and Vienna. She has shown widely both in her native Estonia and abroad. She has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at Ferdinand Bauman Gallery, Prague, Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, Tallinn, and Tanja Wagner Gallery, Berlin.