Myrto Vratsanou has been working in the wood workshop on a series of 11 handmade wooden frames/objects. Together with Anouk Asselineau, she is preparing for a duo-exhibition titled, WARM WORK.
Feb. 2025
The project takes as a starting point jobs held by artists and puts an effort into representing the wage-earning labour that must take place to allow for so-called ‘artistic production’ to occur. The hand-embossed reliefs on copper and aluminium depict details of working life.
Using materials that speak to the fragility of the employment market, the marks on soft craft metal reflect this particular doubling of professional life and its psychological negotiations.
Reflecting on the axes of work, labour, craft and action, the 11 handmade frames function as objects which give gravity to the light metal sheets and in a way monumentalise the time and energy spent on these so-called side jobs. Their angles allow the metal surfaces to reflect light better and invite the viewer to observe them from different sides. They playfully interact with the exhibition room, breaking the verticality of its walls.
At the wood workshop, we first cut the wood planks into smaller pieces, using the band saw and table saw, and then planed them with the planer machines. Afterwards, the pieces were cut according to the design’s specific measurements using the table saw. In order to create binding points for the frames, we used the doweling drilling machines, before glueing the pieces together.
In the finishing stages, we sanded the wood’s surface and coloured them using hard-wax oil and oil-based stain pigment. We wanted the texture of the wood to still be visible under the colour, so we chose transparent pigments and applied only a single thin layer.
