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THROUGHOLT HER CAREER, MARIAN HEYERDAHL HAS focused her research on the connection between life and art. Her sculptures and installations, devoted to themes like birth and fertility, life and death, draw inspiration from the sarcophagi and devotional figures of ancient civilizations. This approach mirrors the artist's knowledge of archaeological finds mainly from Egypt and Latin America, all of which have surrounded her since childhood, being as she is the daughter of the great Norwegian archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl. Her desire to travel and explore exotic cultures brought her to Gambia where she made an installation in 1996 and to China where she took part in a workshop in 2003 and modelled her first terracotta woman in 2006.
Remote, charming and little more than a myth to most Westerners for so long, China changed after 1976 when Mao died. Chinese contemporary art opened up to the Western world showing new artistic avantgardes and is now internationally known.
Despite a massive export of Chinese works, Heyerdahl went in the opposite direction and produced an installation in and for China with the help of local craftsmen. It was exhibited in Beijing in 2007 and proved to be a success. Once again ancient works enchanted the Norwegian artist during her Chinese journey and inspired her to reproduce the figures of Terracotta Warriors from Xi'an, one of the most important and well-known archaeological finds in the world. She has thereby taken on the challenge of an ancient art language, free of nostalgia, to demonstrate her creativity and ethical values. As a consequence, an army was turned into a group of women conveying the unhappiness that wars have brought them. With her Tlte Terracotta Woman, Heyerdahl projects the work from Xi'an into a modem and universal context, arousing our meditations on life and human conditions.
In several installations prior to The Terracotta Woman, Heyerdahl compared the notions of death and danger to those of life and gender, such as in her work entitled Lipstick from 2002, in which cartridges filled with clay are lipstick-shaped except one representing an erect penis. In another installation from 2003, Walking, the shoe of a Berber girl lies on a case full of bullets while Smoke presents a cigar box filled with cartridges. In a series of...