Denise Gieseke

In the Movement of Dissolution

My work for this project explores relations between landscape, atmosphere, embodiment, and perception as shifting visual conditions rather than fixed representational structures. I am interested in moments when what we see cannot be fully explained, named, or resolved. Working with layered pastel, paint, and textured surfaces, I construct environments in which forms emerge and dissolve without stabilizing into fixed meanings.

Across the works, organic growths, atmospheric fields, floating contours, and charged color passages appear as processes rather than objects. They remain in passage between formation and dissolution, where figure and field are not fully separable and visual stability is continually interrupted. Forms emerge only to recede, and what first appears recognizable does not remain long enough to settle into fixed reading.

There is a recurring tension between terrestrial and atmospheric space. Forms appear at the edge of recognition, briefly coalescing before dispersing into indeterminate fields. Even moments of clarity remain unstable, shifting as soon as they are perceived. Image and environment move between legibility and erosion, resisting closure into a single interpretive frame.

Through layering, accumulation, and dissolution, the work explores how forms come into being, change, and disappear. What appears does not remain fixed, and what dissolves does not resolve into absence but continues as a kind of residual presence within perception—something felt as much as seen.