Systems, Individuals & Measuring Tools – Petra Feriancová

Petra Feriancová is an artist who has developed a linguistic code over the years, through which she combines biographical aspects and reflections of a universal nature. What appears as a distinctive feature of her research, namely the use of documentary materials from family archives, or objects of affection related to autobiographical aspects, makes her oeuvre into a complex work that goes beyond the narration or simple description of intimate events to reach an abstract dimension. Before her other artists have explored these modes and processes, linking artistic endeavor to their personal lives, authorial aspects to biographical fragments, developing personal languages and innovative linguistic models. Annette Messager, for example, has made her collections of newspaper clippings, sketches and notes into a way to take possession of the life and events that come to her knowledge. “All day long I browse through, gather, put in order, classify, sort, and I reduce it all into the form of many albums,” she said. “These collections then become my illustrated life.” So in the chapel of Sant Nicolau another work appears in the exhibition space, a carpenter’s workbench bearing a metric scale with casts of vegetables that represent tools of comparison to understand the phases of growth of a fetus in the mother’s womb. The need to measure space and time is the way to determine a territory of belonging and to understand, in the individual sphere, aspects outside the life of the artist herself, placed in relation to autobiographical factors.