Fieldnotes
Fieldnotes observes and visualizes the fragility and discrepancy of our inner and outer self. We all have our memory boards and from time to time, things cut deep into them as we wander through our fields. It leads us through unclear memories, fear, sickness, sensitivity and insecurity. Every fault of our own person and humanity can be found in these notes and in our surrounding. Every matter around us can be a mirror of own and human traumas. At the same time, silence in nature can perform miracles but also show harshness. Fields of memories, fulness, emptiness, fertility, drought. Fields of love, losses, battlefields. The installation speaks to all senses with sound, objects, materials and even scent. The atmosphere was enhanced by sound and smell in collaboration with Mira Lu Kovacs, an Austrian singer and language artist and a room scent that was created with Berlin luxury niche house RAER Scents under the responsibility of Ted Rohn, founder and perfumer behind it.
Installation views, 2025, Galerie MET Berlin, paintings, drawings, objects mono video, room scent
Norman Maýn – Untitled (Die Lichtung), 2025
Fine art pigment print, graphite, coal, acrylic, pigments, emulsion, textiles, fake roses, coal, wood, ink, industrial paint, ash, soot, paper, cut-outs, hair, hay, wool on handmade cotton paper
170 x 120 cm
Unique
The exhibitions concept was to create three rooms that capture the systematic origins of trauma, fear, and the process of entering it after and after during aging and reflections. All works represented metaphorical notes on our personal memory boards. The more inner you went through the space the more you entered the true meaning and fears while the last room was the inserts and showed explicit material. Most of the fears, memories and traumas where connected to the visible appearance of material, nature, and animals and used as symbols and direct reference to us humans. The atmosphere was enhanced by sound and smell in collaboration with Mira Lu Kovacs, and austrian singer and language artist and a room scent that was created with the Berlin luxury niche house RAER Scents under the responsibility of Ted Rohn, founder and perfumer behind it.
Norman Maýn – Untitled (Herde ohne Hirte/Ich als Hund), 2025
Inkjet print, graphite, coal, acrylic, wool, wood, soot, paper paper scraps, bandage on cotton paper
36.8 x 28 cm
Unique
Norman Maýn – Untitled (Nach dem Verlust), 2025
Inkjet print, graphite, coal, acrylic, wool, wood, soot, textiles, industrial paint on matte fibre paper
36.8 x 28 cm
Unique
Norman Maýn – Don’t be fooled by the Sunshine, 2025
Construction rubble, dead plants, pigment print, graphite, coal, acrylic on multiplex board
variable
Unique
Installation view of the corridor before the last room of the exhibition. Visitors had to clim the letter to reach the last nailed up door to the last room. A last hay sack as metaphor for the trauma, that is self-feeding, but at the same time not enough to let live, no water, emaciated horses ….
Norman Maýn – A Horse full of Shame, 2025
Pigment print, graphite, coal, wood, insect, textiles, glue, soot, acrylic on cotton paper, framed
54.2 x 74.2 cm
Unique
´Norman Maýn – Horse with no Name, 2025
Pigment print, graphite, coal, wood, textiles, glue, soot, ink, acrylic on cotton paper, framed
59.2 x 44 cm
Unique
The door installation of the last room „Schuld und Sühne“ from the Exhibition „Fieldnotes“. Visitors could barely enter if they where willing to climb through the nailed planks into the room.
The Innerst
„Siegadel” shows a cadaver of a deer in decay state. It was killed by wolves in the woods. The Name is the official designation for the pack, whose territory is in the wild south of Brandenburg, near the Studio. Norman Maýn followed their trail and traces for a long time. The scene metaphorically depicts the harshness but also the pragmatic logic that, in a certain sense, revolves only around itself without external disturbance and seems to endlessly repeat a drama of life and death. In the exhibition, the video work functioned as a symbol for the innermost core of a trauma, literally eaten away by maggots, which narcissistically devours and feeds itself. Even though the scene presented a particular challenge for visitors, for Maýn it is actually a fact from which nothing frightening should emanate.
Inside the room: Video-installation „Siegadel“, straw, hay, dead flowers, field stone, field bed and dead bird replicas. The room represented the innerst, isolated trauma-sequence.
The Scent
For the exhibition Norman Maýn fulfilled his long awaited dream to create a scent as a complementation of his complex work groups as an addition to all other senses that are addressed. It is a deep earthy, woody, resinous and ritual scent that was exclusively created by luxury niche house RAER Scents based on Norman Maýns memories and inspirations for the work cycle „Fieldnotes“. It contains over 15 ingredients based on raw materials like Nargamotha, Frankincense and Patchouli. These ingredients alone can be warm, radiant and calming, at the same time distancing, cold and dark, thus perfectly capture the theme of the exhibition. For RAER, the quality and meaning of the raw materials in their artistic fragrances is as important as the materials used in Norman Maýns work. The scent is used as a room spray, applied to objects and textures of the exhibition, progresses and changes over time and goes through a complex process of interpretation.
A Performance
Together with with the Polish born Amsterdam based performance artist Angelika Puff, a Performance was created for the opening day, that metaphors the hatching from a cocoon from trauma, scars, wounds and bandages. The Performance was called „Panacea“ and took place in the first room of the exhibition near the installation „The horse Irrwisch/The Irrwisch principle“ that recreated an old primary school classroom. The artist was brought to the room completely tied in bandages and tried to remove them. After she was freed she whistled like a ghosts that still was locked up in her childhood traumas and the stories and memories of all the other children. She then startet to cut and prepare apples and sugar and served it to the visitors. The apples where a reference to different themes of the exhibition like a cure for illness, feeding horses and a symbol for deception like Adam and Eves. The costume for the performance was made of different fabrics and bandages that where matched and used for works of the exhibition as well. Both artists work in same ares like the connection between human, nature and rituals.