She gives words space: Sigrid Sandmann’s theme is the written word. She displays them on large-scale posters or as architecture projections. In the graphic interplay between symbols, the base material and the surrounding architecture, she illuminates the relevance of written language as a reservoir of culture and history.

Words appear in urban spaces in geometric abstraction and in her reduction to black-and-white, which can be interpreted equally as abstract graphic correlations as well as in their specific meaning connotations. In Sandmann’s large pieces displayed in public spaces, the word characters become pictures themselves and their meaning becomes a type of echo.
Collecting and sorting is a part of Sandmann’s artistic work and the basis of her word constructions. In confrontation with a location, its history or its socio-cultural correlations, she researches and abstracts important lingual terms. In her installations, she places the corresponding characters in a visual context with their source.

LichtRouten Piece: Depiction of a Universal Context

In her research on Lüdenscheid’s industrial history, Sigrid Sandmann has gathered terms like “button”, “switch”, “light” or “wire” and isolated them. She examines their origin and association radius on the basis of word co-occurrences. She then gives selected terms a graphic form and places them in a variety of visual contexts. In her dynamic projection, the façade of the former administrative building is transformed into a typographic chamber of curiosities.

LichtRouten-location: Altes Amtshaus (today: Museen der Stadt) I Freiherr-vom-Stein-Straße 15 / Sauerfelder Straße