Helga Steppan works using photography in combination with installation, moving-image and elements of performance. Her work is conceptually driven; she sets up clearly defined parameters to work within and then attempts to fulfill the criteria she has imposed, documenting the process and results.

This way of working can be clearly seen in the series ‘See Through’ for which Steppan audited all of her belongings and divided them into a full spectrum of different colour groupings to photograph. The final images are visually seductive and ask the viewer to consider whether they can discover the artist’s persona reflected in the meticulously constructed installations of her material possessions.

‘Belongings Apart’ takes the process of documentation further by internalising it as its artistic principle. Steppan asked different people each to lend her one transparent object belonging to them. Next, she documented the physical spaces once occupied by these objects in the owners’ private interiors. In some of the images, the void left by the missing object is glaringly obvious, like the melancholic emptiness of a trinket box that might once have contained a piece of jewellery. At other times, the disappearance of the object seems to leave no significant mark on the interior.

Steppan also asked each person to compose a piece of text about the object they lent her and incorporated these personal accounts into the work having first suppressed the name of the object to which they relate. Finally she combined all of the individual transparent objects to produce a single sculptural installation. Displaced from their original environment, erased from the accounts describing their meaning and juxtaposed with other objects in a new context they become anonymous and subject to multiple different readings and interpretations.

‘Belongings Apart’ questions the extent to which an object or possession can ever represent its owner or hold particular meaning and invites the audience to discover its own associations in the work. The Transparency of the objects provides only a faint trace of the narratives that these objects used to be part of.

Steppan’s multi-pronged experiments in documenting demonstrate that the process of reconstruction highlights the powers of the apparently mundane objects to summon memories and evoke experiences.