It is perhaps the melancholy way of saying this that best captures the tone of the atmosphere prevalent in Summer Heart. Ehling's images often show moments of isolation in which a young soul appears to glance at itself, as if in a trance. There are empty glances in which a current experience is clearly compared with something previously experienced. Ehling, however, emphatically refuses to decide how far these mechanisms of the unconscious are associated with the discovery of one's own identity. Whatever the case may be, the stuffed rabbit remains tightly in the child's grasp. The scenarios of daily life encountered here forcefully reflect the reality that everything is in a state of flux in the early phases of life. There are images of the raindrops that trickle down the window pane, obscuring the view out, snowflakes that get almost imperceptibly caught in long hair and a wading pool that beckons on a green summer meadow. Ehling continually finds new motifs, fragile embodiments that have an almost mythical way of consolidating elements of natural moments. Childhood to her, it seems, is a question of temperature.
Thekla Ehling, lives and works in Koln, Germany.