Verlustreich, Maria Kling

Description

Verlustreich is an ongoing series of modular electromagnetic sculptures. It celebrates the beauty of messy electromagnetic coils, the strength of iron cores, and the poetry of induction.
Built from modular metal parts and orange extension leads, the works form beautiful, tangled coils and transformers. Electricity at frequencies between 1 and 60 hertz runs through them, and can be felt, invisibly, with a magnet held in the hand or against the skin.
Each piece carries a hidden but fully functioning physical layer, there to be explored on site through touch and sensory devices.
The series moves you with the sculptures themselves, while quietly questioning how we engage with art, with exhibitions, and with experiments.
“Verlustreich” is German for “lossy,” or “rich in loss,” a term often applied to the heat and resistance every coil gives off. The coils in this series are especially lossy, yet beautiful, and they invite you to consider different readings of “lossiness,” of “richness in loss,” or “richness through loss.”