Dārta Sidere
Dārta Sidere is a sculptor from Riga, Latvia who mainly uses found stone to create works that engage with the space of touch, geological time, and the temporality of nature. Whether using stone found in a city’s architecture, or hiking out to find local rock in the countryside, Dārta commits to recycling material to communicate physically through form about the histories that surround her.
Dārta welcomed us to her studio in Saint-Denis and showed us the pieces that will be included in her upcoming exhibition about the peat bogs near her childhood home in Latvia. She invited us to use a chisel and hammer to carve out the ripples in a large marble worm she has been working on.
Artist’s Website
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Dārta welcomed us to her studio in Saint-Denis and showed us the pieces that will be included in her upcoming exhibition about the peat bogs near her childhood home in Latvia. She invited us to use a chisel and hammer to carve out the ripples in a large marble worm she has been working on.
Artist’s Website
Dārta: Okay, so I started by making these lines because I want to shape it, not perfectly rounded, but something like this. So it's the beginning of how it's going to look. We can just try to remove these angles. It's a work in progress. It's going to be quite long, I think. [Darta hands us each a tool] You can take this one! A chisel! And then you can just try to make it round.
[We all begin chiselling, making a loud ringing sound for a few moments]
MR: It's so satisfying.
DS: Yeah [laughs]. It’s great. I also enjoy this noise, when I work with these manual tools, because now I often use different types of electronic tools and it’s very loud.
Renée: Can you start talking about your artistic journey? When did you start making art and how did you get to this point in your career?
DS: I come from Latvia. I was studying French in school. And after graduating high school, I wanted to learn more, so I decided to come here. At the beginning, I was in Rennes, it’s a city in Bretagne. It was a university, so the studies were more theoretical. After around the third year, I went to Milan in an exchange program at Accademia di Brera. It was a fine arts school, and that's where I found out about stone carving. I had never imagined working with stone before, but as I was in an exchange program, I wanted to try new things. There was this carving workshop so I decided to give it a try and since then I am still doing it. Afterwards I went back to Bretagne and I continued to do my master's. Then I wanted to learn more about stone carving, so I went to Beaux-Arts Paris. While I was in Bretagne, I was working more with video because it was easier at the time. In my videos I was looking at body images, how skin can be perceived as something material. Something that’s not related to the person, but just as the external tissue. When I work with stone, it's the opposite. I'm looking to make the stone something more vivid, something that breathes, like the surface of a skin that can feel something, in a way. To integrate this haptic vision, when we can touch through our eyes.
MR: What is your research process like? How much of your sculptures are planned out ahead of time and how much of it is more intuitive, following the material itself?
DS: It depends. There are some sculptures that start from the thought, and then I create the model. Often it's the bigger sculptures that I have made. And then as I said, these ones, [points to the hanging sculptures on the wall behind her] these are very intuitive sketches that I put on the stone. It takes a bit of time for a sketch [laughs]. But they are more like illustrations of some feelings, moments that I lived, the captured moments. There is one work that I want to make, a new one, in aluminium cast. I have the idea, but I'm not yet in production. So it depends on the different kinds of projects. Sometimes I take more time to reflect and to think about something very specific. And then this one [referring to the stone worm we are carving], I started with the idea about this worm feeling, form feeling, like how it's moving and now I'm trying to recreate this sensation that I can imagine of the worm.
MR: What is this peat bog project that you're doing right now, this exhibition? How big is it, and what are your ideas with it?
DS: It's going to be more about this bog feeling. It's a duo show and we just started to think about it. This summer, and even the last three, four years, when I go back to Latvia, we always go for a walk in a bog. It's a very magical, mystical space to see these trees that are like 100 years old, but they are the height of a person, and to see how the time has been in a way, stopped. I think it's like the time that you don't see during the process of evolution. I see it more as a captured time. And in the peat, the soil is quite acidic, the worms don't live there. This sculpture is just a part of a worm. It's not entirely there, it's just the middle of it, so there's something also about that.
RF: You're talking about how you're inspired by the peats from going home, so does it feel like this project is like a letter towards home and your memories there?
DS: Yes, I think because sometimes when I go to Latvia, I do residencies there and when I’m in nature it's so nice, it's so good. When I come back here, I create these works about the memories of nature and that feeling. For example, this one, this small one, the title is By the pond. I think I made it in May.It was really hot here and I was remembering these moments when you are at the pond with no one around, just looking at these plants that are going into the wind and it's like this calm moment. It was the feeling of the memory that I recreated. And also these sand castles. When we were kids, we spent our summertime at this seaside village. My aunt, she has a house, and we’d spend our days on the sea and we made these types of sand castles.
MR: Like the dripping?
DS: Yeah, the dripping. I realized when I went to the beach with my friend, and she has a kid, and for her the sand castle, it's not dripping. It's with a pail. It was very interesting to see the different perceptions we have about sand castles.
RF: Yeah, those are beautiful. I definitely got that effect. They feel like they're in motion, kind of dripping down.
DS: Mm. And this work was very intuitive. I started to make it while I was in a residency, also in Latvia, next to the seaside. I made small models thinking about the form. But then when I started to create it, I didn't use them because it was more intuitive to recreate the movement. And it is also sandstone, so it's kind of like the compressed sand.
RF: You mentioned this briefly, but we also saw that on your website, your bio describes how you hope to define “a space of touch.” How do you hope viewers will interact with your work? Do you encourage touch or is it more like an emotional…
DS: It's more meant to see and to feel, like the material and also this feeling, the memory of it. I work with a lot of stones to make them look like something different than— for example, this one, it's alabaster. For me, stone, it's something heavy, it's giving me back pain [laughs].But then by removing layers I'm trying to make it lighter and at some point it takes off this kind of pain, physical pain. The space of touch is something you have to recreate more with the feeling.
MR: I read an article by Brenda Jouys—
DS: Oh, yes!
MR: She wrote about your work. And she described how in your sculptures the intensity of the material subtraction reflects the passage of time, and she said that when a viewer looks at it, it's maybe difficult to know, are the marks made by the artist's hand or through, like, water droplets making these indentations, by a more organic passage of time. So I was curious, what role does the passage of time or duration play in your practice?
DS: I think that was my diploma work that [Jouys] was talking about, but I'm still using this relation between manual work and something that has been created by nature. [Points to a piece] the hand gesture carved seaweed, and the other part is the reaction of the acid where it removed one part and it really revealed another one. It creates a dynamic where they work together. I wanted to leave one side that I hadn't worked on, to talk about this natural part. After finishing school we created a collective Cella and our main thing that brought us together was this manual work and working with materials inspired by Tim Ingold Making Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, and how to shape the world with our hands. Oh my diploma’s title was Tempsification de l’espace where it was about how time changes the space.
MR: Well, I actually wrote down a quote that was with your piece In Transit. On your website you wrote, “The landscape is changing and the only thing that we can take is a memory of the place.” And yeah, it feels like you're documenting that place-memory.
DS: Yes, In Transit, that was one of the works where I was working to bring these three dynamics together: manual work, the industrial process, and natural time.
MR: Oh, and then in your piece, Sous-face du paysage, am I saying that right?
DS: Yes, it's the underside of the landscape.I was looking at something that’s under the surface.
MR: Yeah. Your artist's statement for that piece describes that the sculpture’s relief reflects geological time. So how does geological time feel different to you from other kinds of time?
DS: Oh, it's a very long time [laughs]. Like, so long that becomes something very abstract. And just to imagine how people, geographers and scientists, measure this time, to understand how they managed to put it together…And I think, with the acid that I use on my sculptures, at some point it's like I see this time. There is also this work of mine, Memories of the sea, 300 millions years ago, where the stone is cut in half and it’s like an opening into the passage of time - the creation for the stone is millions of years - so when I open it, it's very powerful to imagine how other lives have been there, with the fossils and other traces that can be found.
RF: Did you study geology at all in school, or is it just something you’ve researched on your own?
DS: No, I didn't study it more particularly,I had geography in school.The interest for geology came with my practice. It started with understanding about the three different kinds of possibilities of how stones are created.
MR: Igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary.
DS: Ah yes, thank you [all laugh]! It was through the sense of the stone that I started to be interested in geography. And now I continue to look at maps and how we create maps, and also today with the political situation, to see how it's actually person-made. And to understand here in Europe, we see the world on the map from one point of view, and then, I don't know, in China, they see it from another point of view. I'm also interested in how it's going to change in the future. With the Arctic melting there will be new continents appearing. To imagine how it's going to be and then how we will try to adapt. These past years I am quite anxious about the actual geopolitical situation. This summer I read this book, Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall, to try to understand the reasons why it's happening. He was explaining through geography how for a long time there will be these conflicts because some nations will need to have their resources or access to sea.
MR: Do you find yourself drawn to certain types of histories, certain places or types of geologies?
DS: I go where the research brings me. I'm open and I continue to do one thing that I'm interested in and then at one point I go back or I find new subjects.
MR: Yeah, so much of your work seems to be so well researched and drawn from science and history. When you start a new project, are you researching while you're physically making? Or does more theoretical research come before you make? Or after? Where does that fit in?
DS: For example, the next aluminium piece I want to make, it's more continuity, about how we perceive the map and it started with the research first. As today more often we see our world as two dimensional in a telephone, with Google Maps, then looking at the globe. The flat Earth theory also has spread and there are more and more people that believe that. The research started with thinking about maps, and how the physical maps were made. I can show you the model, the title is The Globe Gore. The Gore is what you put on the Globe, the cut map.
RF: And it opens up.
DS: Yeah. And that's what the sculpture is like, and at the same time it becomes something like an animal carcass that has been left behind.
MR: Yeah, so the research kind of comes first usually.
DS: Sometimes it starts with the form, for example, the Matrioshka Brain. It started with a shape. And then I found out this concept that the scientist Robert J. Bradbury imagined, about where the world will be in a million years from now. The concept is that we will use solar panels around the sun to get more energy and he calls it the Matrioshka brain, as there will be many layers just like the doll. And so yes, there are some works that start with just a shape and then I find what it's gonna become.
RF: A lot of your work seems to be about memorializing time and place, and you obviously work in stone, which is a very concrete, permanent material. So can you talk about the permanence of your work and what you envision the future of your pieces to be?
MR: When you're talking about geological time and these stones taking millions of years to be made, by giving them a new shape, are you kind of changing their identity as a stone? Are you creating this new chapter of their existence, the next chapter of their long, long life?
DS: Yeah, I have some works that I put in the garden so they become all green with the moss, and it totally changes the purpose of the sculpture that I made. So it continues to exist. And today I'm also looking at how to integrate moss in my work to create a real ecosystem.
MR: That actually kind of brings us to the next question, which is about how a lot of your work joins multiple texturally different materials together. How do you decide which materials to join?
DS: That can be a long process. There are some series of works which dialogue with two different kinds of materials. Often there's stone and metal that becomes a pedestal, or the support. But then there's this work, one of my last ones, the desert flower. It’s a marble sculpture on a steel wool. The choice for these materials is more about the feeling of the steel wool, which is something very rigorous and not very pleasant to touch, in relation to this soft marble that it’s sitting on. The desert flower, it’s about this feeling that I imagine in a desert. How a sand storm could polish the marble. Recently I also saw the movie Sirât,which is about a rave party in the desert. I found that during the film the images were so powerful about this feeling in a desert. Sometimes it takes a lot of time, because I make a sculpture and then I just put it somewhere and I'm waiting to know what to put it with. Sometimes it’s not ready. There's one outside that is still waiting for something to be put together with. So, yes, I don't have this protocol that I follow. Oh also the steel wool, it was about continuing to explore the natural wool felting technique by using this industrial material.
RF: Yeah, I was interested in those pieces with wool and stone, these very opposite materials that seem very physically impossible to be balanced and work together. So I was wondering, what is your process in physically balancing the weight of the material? How do those opposites and those juxtapositions, light and heavy, soft and hard, play into your ideas?
DS: I try to make the stone something lighter. And also with the aluminum piece, it's made from polystyrene and it looks very light. But the sculpture is cast in aluminium, so it's quite heavy. I’m looking at how to shift the perception of different materials.
MR: It looks like a geode.
DS: Yes, also. It started with this shape of a matrioshka and I was thinking as well about the Earth’s three layers. In the middle with the core that’s shaped as a spaceship to reference the future imagined in space, like with the concept of the Matrioshka brain.
[At this point we had made our way upstairs to Darta’s desk, which was littered with rocks, little sculptures and materials.]
MR: Are these [gesturing to her collection] inspiring materials?
DS: Yes and these are scale models. This is steel wool, a foam and this is a fly that I made in a soapstone and then there was a real fly that died next to it. So this is my kind of cabinet of curiosities. This is the moss that I am starting to think about how to grow on the stones. And then there is also this marble leaf. It started where I had this marble block on the table and this corkboard next to it, and I found the dialogue between them very interesting. Afterwards I was painting the wall and I put a plastic bag on the marble leaf corkboard sculpture, and I realized that I actually also like the dynamic between the three of them. So I left it like this and I prefer it. And these are the new projects that I'm still working on, for example, this mushroom leather.
RF: Oh, cool, wow. It’s so soft.
DS: I found out that we could use the mushrooms that are growing on the trees as leather. Lately I'm also very interested in mushrooms. I think it also comes as a memory of home, because in Latvia we have this thing about the mushrooms. In autumn, everyone’s going mushroom picking. So I'm working on this material that I think is going to be part of something. And then there are some glass sculptures. I did a glass workshop some months ago. These are just small objects that I keep around and then at some point maybe I’ll do something with it. Oh, and those are small models that I made during the residency for the sandcastles.
RF: These are beautiful.
MR: This feels like a very inspiring space, like you're surrounded by materials.
DS: Yeah, sometimes it feels like I have a lot of things to do [laughs]. And this is one of the marbles I put in acid. It feels like the leather, this transformation of the material.
MR: The mushrooms are so cool.
RF: Yeah I’m so excited about that.
DS: These are the finished ones [hands us a few small pieces of mushrooms]. I tried to make bigger parts, but it's not working as well as I was expecting. It is the amadouvier that's the mushroom’s name in French. I put it in the water for two days, and then I need to just tap it and then it becomes the flat leather material. But it’s still in the research phase. On Facebook, there is this group of people passionate about mushrooms I follow, and they share all these amazing pictures. I’ve found that the shapes of mushrooms can be very inspiring. There is also this species called blob in french, that's between fungus and animal. It's fascinating because it grows, moves and eats. For example, it eats oats.
MR: Wow.
DS: And there was one moment when I wanted to buy one and grow it, but then I was too afraid that it would expand [laughs]. But, yeah, also mushrooms’ networks, that's something very interesting. I'm not there yet, but…
MR: It’s something beneath the surface.
DS: Yes, exactly.
MR: In your residency project Fragility from Heaviness, you source material from the local environment, and that is similar to what you’re doing here. So how often are you using local materials and how do the local materials usually guide the way that you create?
DS: In the residencies often I use the materials that I find. For in transit, it was the local stone that I used also from Luxembourg that they used to build the bridges and the city. And then this residency in Kuliga was also about going into the natural environment and finding the stones that I wanted to take back. I'm into finding objects and materials. So I often use found objects. Also these stones, they are found. I think it also guides me in a way how to make decisions.
RF: See what ideas come to you.
MR: Intuition.
DS: Yeah, there's a lot of intuition. I have this tendency to take things and think, oh, maybe it's gonna be useful at some point.
RF: Yeah, I definitely do that too.
DS: Yeah, that's tricky.
RF: And then you never get around to using it.
DS: And then you have a lot of things around you.
RF: Yeah.
DS: But now it's nice because there are many of us in this studio, so sometimes it can be useful to someone else as well.
MR: Also for that residency, you did the collaboration with the chef, right?
DS: Oh, yeah, that was fun.
MR: We're curious about that, and we wanted to also ask about collaboration. And I mean, you're talking about this collective that you formed, so we're curious about collaboration in your work.
DS: The collaboration during the residency was organized as a new type of an experience. We worked together with the chief. In the first weeks I started to research which kind of materials I would use, and then the chef came, we talked, and he started to think about the menu that he would propose. For example, he did some fish in beeswax. It was the fish for the same river where I went to pick my stones for the suspended installation. At first I wanted to see if it is possible to put it in clay, where it could be heated in the clay and then you just cut it with the stone and open it and eat it. But he said it would be better to use beeswax so the process of getting it was quite similar. After pouring melted beeswax, it got harder and then it was possible to cut it and then open it. For the collective, it was more about working together on exhibition projects for two years, after COVID. I think it was a good period for us because we were newly graduated and it was nice to collaborate and not to be alone. We organized a sculpture festival here in Saint-Denis in three different places, bringing together around 20 artists. Everyone did their own work, but we formed this group with the common focus on manual practice and material exploration. Another recent collaboration I did was during a residency at the University of Technology of Troyes. We were invited to work together with scientists and doctoral students in nanotechnology. It was interesting to think differently. I was collaborating with two of their researchers. One of them was working on optical tweezers and the manipulation of nanoparticles using scientific silicon by putting the molecules inside and changing their position, in a way creating nano sculptures.We were working on this piece called Fossil Light. We used amber dust that is captured in the silicon mass, and it was shown under UV lights and also some warm light. I had been looking forward to working with amber for a while.The first amber that I found on the beach was so small, like the size of a sand, but I noticed it because it sparkled and reflected the sunlight. The feeling was like finding something very precious in the infinity of sand. Probably that’s why we call it Latvian gold.
MR: That's a really cool opportunity to work with a scientist.
DS:Yes, they have a different approach and it took me a while to get back into physics.
RF: Do you feel like you were able to learn from each other?
DS: The residency was only two weeks, so it felt very short and the time went by quickly. If I want to learn more, I should probably go back.
RF: That's a hard subject to understand.
DS: Yeah. It was really like I went back to school.
MR: What kind of stuff does your collective do and do you guys have a name?
DS: It’s Collectif Cella. Today the collective is not very active, because some other members have moved to other cities. But it was a nice time.
MR: Yeah. That is all of our questions. So, is there anything that you feel like you would want to touch more on or, like, something that people don't usually ask you in interviews that you’re like, I wish I got a chance to talk about this?
DS: I don't know, no, I think it's okay. It was nice to talk about the work and the stones.
MR: Thank you so much.
DS: Thank you.
- Matrioshka brain, 2021 (photo courtesy of artist)
- Our collaboration
- desert flower, 2024 (photo courtesy of artist)
- Border artwork left: Hovering in water, 2025 (photo courtesy of artist) right: Au bord de, 2025 (photo courtesy of artist)
- Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall [book]
- Making Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture by Tim Ingold [book]
- Sirât by Óliver Laxe [film]