Catch the bird

In Angelika Markul's practice, wax is a material of memory. Fragile and responsive to heat and touch, it records the artist's gestures much as an archive would, giving an almost bodily form to the concerns that run through her work: love, myth, extinction, and what she calls the archaeology of the future. Her sculptures suggest human, animal or hybrid bodies, held between presence and absence, persistence and disappearance, without ever resolving into a single identity.

This engagement with the medium places Markul in a line that runs through Joseph Beuys and Matthew Barney, and further back to the historical uses of wax: devotional effigies, anatomical models, funerary masks. In each case, wax was used to hold on to a presence beyond life. 

Drawing on these histories, Markul treats the material as something that retains touch, care and time, giving memory a physical weight. Catch the Bird, the side table she conceived for ColAAb, grows directly out of this approach. Modelled in wax and then cast in aluminium, the artist finishes each table herself, applying copper leaf to the surface and drawing its features by hand. No two are alike: every piece carries its own marks, and stands as both sculpture and presence.

Signed, numbered, and limited to 100.