After we meet over Zoom, Caspar Heinemann tells me that he conceives of his apply as a single undertaking that finds a number of modes of expression, together with poetry, efficiency and set up. For his 2022 present, ‘Glorie’, at Cupboard in London, Heinemann created an eponymous sequence of cardboard birdhouses, which, he tells me adamantly, ‘wasn’t about birds’. Nevertheless, in ‘Sod All’, his present solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire in London, these winged messengers are now not implied by their absence however have change into a central, portentous tenet. By a sequence of sculptural works (‘Scarers’, 2025) and a big site-specific set up (Lifeless Geese, 2025), the artist returns to birds, he says, to supply a brand new perspective on the ‘materials actuality and ubiquitous metaphor’ of the boundary.
In lots of cultures, birds signify a threshold between heaven and earth, symbolizing the opportunity of motion between religious and materials realms. For Heinemann, these creatures provide a poetic means by which to come across what he describes because the ‘key downside of the present’: ‘the need of boundaries, and the need of an inside and an outdoor for something to exist in any respect’ – whilst that turns into ‘politically problematic’. The notion of a border, in suggesting the separation of 1 entity into two, evokes a violent rupture. Heinemann is within the want for such violence in enabling something to exist autonomously.
In 2019, Heinemann revealed his debut e book of poetry, Novelty Principle. His earlier exhibitions – resembling ‘The Frayed White Collar’ (2023) at Édouard Montassut, Paris, and ‘Shared Private Gnosis’ (2017) at Almanac Tasks, London – explored the connection between making objects and writing. In ‘Glorie’, for instance, the formal dialog between language and object functioned extra as an overarching sensibility, expressed by way of the handcrafted ornamentation of cardboard birdhouses. Flimsy, obstructively adorned and thus unsuitable for housing birds, these constructions felt extra like idealized representations than ‘actual’ properties.
‘Sod All’ is equally involved with each materials and metaphor. Nevertheless, it isn’t in any respect a rarefied language recreation: it’s one thing far dirtier. Heinemann attracts my consideration to the pun within the present’s title. In English, ‘sod’ carries a number of layered meanings: a clump of earth or a soil-covered patch of floor; a fortunate, enviable particular person jealous or a poor, pitiable particular person; an expression of rage or one among pessimistic resignation (as in ‘Sod’s legislation’). Wordplay is among the hallmarks of Heinemann’s apply. But, his strategy has an acerbic chew in a rustic the place self-deprecation has been inflated to pompous proportions.
When it’s good, I don’t get what it’s doing. [The work’s] secrecy and unknowability is type of the holiness.
Heinemann intimates that the ‘trashy’ nature of his artwork is immediately associated to the ‘trashy’ world that births it. His ‘needs-must’ strategy to creating is undergirded by environmental angst – a sense he admits contributed to his determination to function a ‘completely dematerialized apply’ between 2017 and 2019, earlier than he accepted ‘the horror of manufacturing’. It is usually a legacy of the artist’s expertise in squatting communities, the place you ‘make it occur with what you’ve gotten’. Inside this punk ethos, nothing is valuable; all is offered for reuse and reimagination. ‘The Frayed White Collar’ included a wall-mounted assemblage constructed from salvaged crate planks adorned with dollhouse furnishings (Grandfather’s Axe, 2023). It’s an object haunted by the works of Joseph Cornell and Paul Thek, however extra provisional in type.
Historic narratives are additionally topic to Heinemann’s reimagination. In a letter to a mysterious artist named ‘Ed’, which comprised the press launch for ‘The Frayed White Collar’, Heinemann describes the present as ‘setting up a type of fiction […] historical past of the Unabomber […] primarily based on his personal account of a dialog with a psychiatrist as a younger man’. For Heinemann, reimagining the previous entails a hopeful as a lot as a disenchanted orientation to the world – a sense that issues may have been totally different. That is, in a manner, additionally an encounter with radical uncertainty, emphasizing the contingency on which historical past hangs. Artwork’s present is to offer an area to come across the esoteric. As Heinemann says, ‘When it’s good, I don’t get what it’s doing. [The work’s] secrecy and unknowability is type of the holiness.’ In Biblical Hebrew, ‘sod’ means a secret, a plan, a bunch of confidants or a counsel – though many students suggest that the phrase is essentially untranslatable, conveying the profound thriller of decoding divine language.
Heinemann tells me that the chicken sculptures in ‘Sod All’ are paying homage to the griffin-like illustrations in The Birds’ Head Haggadah, an illustrated Ashkenazi Passover Haggadah produced in southern Germany round 1300. The manuscript makes use of avian heads to bypass the prohibition on representing human types. Heinemann’s birds are a similar meditation on abstraction and hybridization, contemplating how a factor could be each what it’s and what it isn’t, how an object can manifest a top quality even because it repels it. A detailed good friend of Heinemann’s died simply earlier than he began work on the present, and grief flows by way of ‘Sod All’. Like Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), to whom sparrows sing in ‘Greek voices’ of Evans, his lifeless good friend, Heinemann’s birds try to – in his phrases – ‘metabolize’ the incommunicable tragedy of sudden disappearance. How has the world modified? The place has the particular person gone?
The border between loss of life and life is the last word threshold: the one which exemplifies the necessity to erect all others. Loss of life is each sure (it should occur) but in addition unsure (what occurs afterward?). To me, this unsettling confusion catalyzes the anomaly in Heinemann’s work. ‘Sod All’ asks us to maneuver with the birds throughout and over borders, to entry the grief of the crossing in addition to the hope it entails. It provides a brand new aspect to Heinemann’s undertaking of interrogating the fabric and linguistic type of metaphor – one that’s as affective as it’s poetic.
Caspar Heinemann’s ‘Sod All’ is at Studio Voltaire, London, till 3 August. Heinemann can be in dialog with Oreet Ashery on 11 June
Most important picture: Caspar Heinemann, Lifeless Geese, 2025, set up view. Courtest: the artist, Cupboard Gallery, and Studio Voltaire; {photograph}: Sarah Rainer
