I visit my father’s place during European spring or summer. A few years ago, he moved from Munich to a town outside Berlin where he is building a house. When I’m there, I document the house and garden. The pictures I take from year to year always end up looking similar, but out of sync if viewed sequentially.
The greenhouse was a gradual addition and, like the rest of the house, remains a work-in-progress. In my mind, I see it as an out-of-scale double of a larger, industrial glasshouse from a different location where my grandparents once cultivated carnations. It looks nothing like it, but there is a sense of elaboration, a debt to this past.
The tarp construction and how it entraps what is ambient always makes me think of eye floaters and then camera and lens. I have a memory—accurate or not—where my grandfather who had a glass eye would take out the prosthesis and chase us around the glasshouse and corridors of soil beds. The convex shape of his device emanated an air of apotropaic power. I also remember how his absent right eye affected his proprioception, which he knew not to trust. Pouring a glass of water, for instance, he had to use both his hands. There was no other way to measure the correct distance between body and object than to let one hand find the other.
I like taking photos of the greenhouse, maybe because of this sense of stacked timelines and relationships between body and capture, but I never end up using them directly in any of my work.
Ruth Höflich is a visual artist primarily working in moving image and photography. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including at NGV Melbourne, IFFR, Images Festival, Art Gallery of NSW, ICA London amongst many others. She holds an MFA from Bard College, NY and is currently living and working in Narrm/Melbourne where she recently completed a studio residency at Gertrude Contemporary.
