Biography
Holger ChristianLönze is a bronze sculptor and artist based near Ballydehob in West Cork, Ireland. Since moving to Ireland in 1995, he has widely exhibited in group and solo art exhibitions in Ireland, Germany, France, Italy and the UK and has worked on public and corporate sculpture commissions for more than ten years. Holger was born in Schmallenberg, Westphalia, Germany. He trained as a furniture maker before studying architecture in Detmold and lithography and sculpture in Belfast, where he also completed a DPhil applying gestalt psychology to the perception of time in art. While researching design-for-sustainability for The Eden Project in Cornwall, he became interested in the ecological aspects of many Irish craft traditions and curachs in particular. Subsequently he has run many workshops incurach making and built several of the west coast boats.
Proposal
The proposed sculpture work for the Sanctuary project will explore the concept of ‘home’ through sculpture and drawing. While the concept of home is generally associated with the stable and static shelter of the house, other forms of home are often more obscure: the tent of nomadic travellers, the landmarks that sea farers associate with home or the sheet newspaper which give homeless people a glimpse of privacy. In his Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard identifies primal spatial concepts of inhabited places that are associated with home: nests, shells and corners. The proposed work will explore this philosophy leading to a series of small-scale bronze object that contain the notion of home. The objects will be displayed together with drawings, maps and charts that identify the location of these various forms of home. The bronze work will be produced using carbon-neutral, Bronze-Age techniques. I intend to bring some moulds to Kenya and cast some of the work in Nairobi. This will create a connection between my own home in the South-West of Ireland (where the oldest bronze producing sites of the British Isles are located) and the continent of Africa, where many of these ancient metal work processes have survived to the present day.
