In the Mood: The Dreamy Hues of Marie Louise Kold’s ‘Lines of Flight’

The atmosphere surrounding Marie Louise Kold’s metal art exhibition at St. James Cavalier, ‘Lines of Flight’, is virtually inescapable to anyone who enters its space. Her pieces are each charged with the intense, uncompromising wave of emotions and marked by a careful, yet raw and exuberant manipulation that weaves together the threads of art and life.

Since the mid-1990s, the Scandinavian artist has worked with materials, like copper, brass and bronze, which are typically perceived as unmalleable because of their metallic nature, and etched and patinated them through the use of acids and other chemicals. But there is something special in the way Kold does this, because she manages to give her works a chameleon-like quality: when cast and exposed to a different light, they come alive, each with the power to divulge a different mood, or set of emotions, as they change colour.

imageIn so doing, Kold’s pieces thrust their audiences onto a journey full of dreams and imagination where, as curator and essayist Dr. Ġorġ Mallia so aptly put it, ‘the sky is but a stepping stone’. Reality is curiously placed in the background of another, more dreamy one, with all of Kold’s, and the audience’s thoughts, hopes and desires caught up together, framed and experienced differently as and when they are seen.

The exhibition is full of such works, some even carrying a photorealistic image, such as the Leila, Without Wings, or an extra piece of metal that could be worn as jewellery (wonderful idea).

Yet, at the end of the corridor, on the left-hand side of the galleries, there sits a Hans Christian Andersen portrait, as if waiting to be approached. From afar, this piece looks like pixel art, but as you get closer, it’s a whole other thing entirely, because Kold’s metal art indeed bears a unique three-dimensionality in the ever-changing mood it divulges.

‘Lines of Flight’ is open until May 25th, in the Upper Galleries of St. James Cavalier.

Monique Chambers
Monique Chambers
