German artist Sibylle Eimermacher (b. 1979) works with a series of replacements – replacements of materials, of logic or defined truths, of art historical determinations, of what we perceive and think of as obvious and indisputable. These fundamental and very subtle replacements also function as a bewilderment – a slight but nagging confusion that is spread towards us as perceivers.

So what is it she does, that can actually be felt as a bewilderment and as a catalyst for new perspectives? At first sight it is not easy to grasp exactly what is embedded in the layers of Sibylle Eimermacher's work – prints of surfaces of stones – but the confusion is exactly what is fruitful and productive. With the next glance, we see that these beautiful and diverse stone surfaces are not only – surfaces. Upon these pale, pastel-coloured, deep-greyish, rough or smooth, softened or multi-layered, but in all cases finite and impenetrable rocks, is an extra layer of folds. As if the heavy rocks had been folded like a thin piece of paper and then unfolded again. We see the traces of these folds – some as neat as a love letter carefully folded and kept close to the skin, others more spontaneous or as untidy as a piece of paper roughly crumpled and thrown away, and still others like unsuccessful attempts at origami gone awry. The heavy materiality of rock and all its historical connotations as the everlasting material of monuments and power are crumpled up in a single gesture. The monumental is made vulnerable, the eternal ephemeral. And here we are, left in bewilderment, because what should we now think?

Sibylle Eimermacher plays with art history and defined truths in more than one sense. Making rock into paper thus adding weightlessness, fragility and elusiveness to the heavy materiality of rock is also a way of "talking back" to art history by discussing terms and philosophical and existential subjects in an intertextual web of references and open discourses. The crystalline layer upon the materiality hints towards the crystalline utopias of Modernism, but in Sibylle Eimermacher's case the crystalline is multifaceted: The heaviness of rock is a burden right underneath it, and the crystalline is revealed to be just a fragile scrap of paper – so easily blown away and dissolved. Sibylle Eimermacher's Stone Foldings are both: They serve both as investigations of the materiality of things – the rocks – and as distillations of this heavy materiality into something pure and light. The crystalline has a backside that ties it to reality and prevents it from disappearing into nothingness and pure dreaming. Via the origami-like folds, she connects this materiality to mathematics, philosophy and spatial problematics. What is flat and what is voluminous? What is sealed off and what is deep and infinite? Similar to a geologist, Sibylle Eimermacher opens up the many – both material and metaphorical – layers of rock and plays with our defined perceptions of what stone and rock are. By embedding replacement, bewilderment, the irrational and ephemeral into the otherwise strict orders of mathematics, origami and geology – adding a bit of chaos to the hierarchy of rules – the Stone Foldings of Sibylle Eimermacher mark a place for us to rethink. When rock isn't rock we have to reconsider our perception and being.

As in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl where things are never stable and static, but are always a priori in changing conditions with transcendental intersubjectivity and intertextuality that transcend the "sphere of ownness" and entrenched connotations about the stable nature of things and subjects, the work of Sibylle Eimermacher suggests a new perspective for us. The ephemeral, the illusion and the ambiguous all mark an openness, which encourages us to sense, experience and reflectively take part in the considerations and problematics Sibylle Eimermacher's Stone Foldings subtly point towards.

From the publication Stone Foldings