Nathalia Edenmont

December 12, 2024 - February 1, 2025

EGGS

Nathalia Edenmont constantly propels herself towards new artistic frontiers. Her photographs are always visually seductive, but in her new series of works ‘Eggs’, the complicated constructions of previous photographs have been pared down to an essential material form, that of empty and carefully cracked goose eggshell. However the images are far from simple, the photographed eggs are magnificent, proud monolithic sculptural structures made from using goose shells that she already had in her possession. Edenmont had rediscovered the ‘beautiful objects’ that she had collected twelve years ago after being told that after a series of miscarriages, she was infertile. Her artistic imagination provoked her to begin to create artworks in a kind of cathartic expulsion of her traumatic discovery. She bought the goose eggs in the Spring of 2012, and after she had purchased ‘some of the best ones available’ she realised that the unfertilised eggs were a metaphor and that she recognised’ herself and her ‘own experiences in them’. However, she did not continue at that point in using them for her art, she was finding her own autobiographical sufferings as she explained ‘unpalatable’ so instead proceeded with other series of works. But as often happens, Edenmont returned to them over a decade later, finding a renewed and different way to use the eggs that she had collected. Her gift is that she has an ability to transform in her imagination, then expel her personal upheavals and tragedy by creating magic in her compositions.

Edenmont’s work has always also contained. resonances of art history. There is Piero della Francesco’s symbolic egg suspended from the Montefeltro Alterpeice (1465) a symbol of birth and fertility; or perhaps our thoughts drift to the cracked egg with the emerging Narcissus flower in Salvador Dali’s 1937 Metamorphosis of Narcissus. We have the marvellous sculptural forms of Constantin Brâncuși The Beginning of the world (1924) with the mystery of human life and perfect beauty, or Jeff Koons Cracked Egg (Blue) (1994- 2006). Edenmont’s eggs are however very different, they are deeply imbued with her feminine experiences, of being a woman unable to bring to life a child and it is in the process of her ‘cracking’ that we unravel the significance of these haunting photographs. Having rediscovered her shells, by her of the unfertilised eggs and stored them, she set to work to find a new way of engaging with her own life force, bringing new life and creative energy the empty shells. Edenmont had previously been creating with the beautiful coloured shells of tree snails and butterfly wings creating strange new fauna but now the colour is drained from her photographs and the process of working with the fragility and delicacy of butterfly wings transferred to the power of Edenmont’s hand: She moves her fingers and palm around the white goose egg shells in a circular motion as one might caress a womb carrying a child, but then she presses with her fingers and thumb in order to crack the shell exerting different pressures to create the different depth and amounts of cracks: Her working method is totally immersive intense, and time consuming using trial and error. Many of the experiments did not work, the formation of the cracks, the fault lines in the shells not aesthetically pleasing. So she persevered trying again and again – tapping and pressing the shells, retaining just a precious few to photograph and losing around two hundred egg shells in the process. Each haunting photograph of the egg shell seems suspended in an infinite black universe a potent evocative of life and loss.

In a circuitous route Edenmont is reinventing a genre she dealt with for many years in early works such as her surreal Happy (2003) with mice emerging from eggs, or Kira (2003) where the yolk of an egg replaces the yellow disc florets of a daisy. But now the delicate crevices and fractures in the shells surface show an absence at the core, the contents already hatched or never there the photographs giving her ‘goose bumps’.