Rose Schlemmer: Meet the Member Profile of the Week
Today’s Meet the Members profile is Rose Schlemmer. She is a first-year grad student currently working at Indiana University. Rose completed her undergraduate degree at Bowling Green State University under Tom Muir, Masako Onodera and Andrew Kuebeck.
You can visit Rose’s website here: http://www.roseschlemmer.com/
You can visit Rose’s Instagram here: @rosiemussshroom
Rose in her studio space.
When I talked to Rose we discuseed her current body of work in which she is exploring new materials and subjects from previous bodies of work. She’s been working in two different directions: body imagery and the repetitive nature of objects. She’s been “using this material to demonstrate how people react to their bodies and different body parts”. She’s also been taking inspiration from Edmund de Waal and Eva Hesse to explore repetition and minimalist aesthetic ideals. A lot of this current body of work has been based in exploration for Rose. She’s been focusing on “material study to figure out where exactly I am going with this and what it is that I’m so interested in”.
She also spoke about other artist inspirations and how they have influenced her previous bodies of work. Some artists include Peter Hoogeboom, Iris Eichenberg and Ruudt Peters. She also draws inspiration from Monika Brugger, in more ways than one. “She has curated lots of museum shows and that’s the area that she’s more focused on… I think I enjoy her a lot because she knows how to talk about her work as well as other artists’. I feel like I can get a lot of information from her and a lot of relevancy into why I make my work and what it is about it that is connecting to current trends in art as well as past influences.”
Rose’s studio space.
Rose is in the process of finishing her first year as a graduate student and we discussed what she has taken away from this first year. “I think the ability to experiment. When I first came in here I was really stuck on the ‘should I be making work that I am really, really wonderful at and demonstrating my skills and everything that I’ve learned from undergrad?’ …I got to a point where it was like ‘I proved myself in undergrad, I proved that I could do it and why should I be here and make the same thing over and over again? If I did I wouldn’t need to go on to grad school. I could have just earned my bachelor’s degree.’ So I think the best thing is that I was able to come in here and decide to detach myself from previous work, start over and make something completely new and work with a material I’ve never got to sit down and touch before.” Watching her transition from a completely new start to where she is now, I think she has accomplished just that.
Please visit Rose’s website to learn more about her previous bodies of work and her Instagram @rosiemussshroom to check out progress shots of her work and adventures in metalsmithing. Check in next week when we talk to Zoe Bilello about her work.
written by Alex Lawless
