WALKING PIECES

Fiona Römpp draws her inspiration from traces found in her environment, seeking for communication with water, light, the ground beneath our feet and sounds that surround us. They carry our stories, with them we travel through time. The rivers in Germany where she grew up, mountains and clear lakes in the Swiss countryside where she spent the last decade as well as the rough sea and coast of the Atlantic as a second home are companions in her work. Since moving to the Netherlands she have come to love the wide open fields and man-made waterways and the abundance of waterbirds that come with them.

Her work has both been a source of comfort for the yearning of wilder landscape as well as a joyful collaboration with the countryside, cities and towns she find herself in.

About the work, Fiona says:
We poke our heads outdoors, wrap up warm against the winter blasts and hurry as fast as possible through the cold wet streets to our next destination. Yet… underfoot there is a parallel world of little broken bits and bobs, traces of our individual and collective stories. Objects that are sometimes in plain sight, sometimes hidden away, elusively peeping out from under a leaf.

They whisper, giggle or call out. Gingerly I pick the little rusty wingnut out of the gutter and balance it in the palm of my hand, lifting it up to my eyes before I slip it into my pocket, where it joins other foundlings of the day: a small piece of frayed rope and a lost marble. Do kids still play with marbles? I thought they were long forgotten, almost exctinct.

And now, here…. My found objects come together, some from other times, years, places…. Together we build another world with their forgotten and imagined pasts, flashes of stories forming and disappearing as I arrange my little foundlings, leading them off to their new adventures. Letting them become their own entities, chattering, playing, hiding in corners or comfortably sitting in their own new little box. New lives and past lives cross, mingle, tell new stories of imagined memories.

Instagram Fiona