Making things takes time. My everyday impatience—with the world, with people—disappears when
materials, or rather, processing or working on and with materials, demand, impose their own conditions oftime, of temporal extension, of patience, of humility. I take materials very seriously. My seriousness about things, about making things, my attempt to hold onto the energy of both the material and the process of making, in solitude, ideally connects me, through the work, to a void that may become available to the viewer, as such.

I am an object-maker because I believe in the power of objects. Objects may comfort us, make us
present, create an awareness of ourselves. There is no self without objects to make up our constitutive
outside, to map out, and to reassure us of our own existence. The objects I create fill the void where
words fail us. Objects legitimate our existence. The three-dimensional objects I create, out of familiar,
everyday materials—wool, steel, textiles, clay, nails, mirrors, pantyhose—at the same time render strange
what we think we already know—about ourselves, about the world.

Iris Eichenberg mentors Fran Leitch  and   Susan Videler

Ornamentum at Simone DeSousa gallery