The Unknowable Secrecy of Caspar Heinemann’s Art

When we meet over Zoom, Caspar Heinemann tells me that he conceives of his practice as a single project that finds multiple modes of expression, including poetry, performance and installation. For his 2022 show, ‘Glorie’, at Cabinet in London, Heinemann created an eponymous series of cardboard birdhouses, which, he tells me adamantly, ‘wasn’t about birds’. However, in ‘Sod All’, his current solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire in London, these winged messengers are no longer implied by their absence but have become a central, portentous tenet. Through a series of sculptural works (‘Scarers’, 2025) and a large site-specific installation (Dead Ducks, 2025), the artist returns to birds, he says, to offer a new perspective on the ‘material reality and ubiquitous metaphor’ of the boundary.

In many cultures, birds represent a threshold between heaven and earth, symbolizing the possibility of movement between spiritual and material realms. For Heinemann, these creatures offer a poetic means by which to encounter what he describes as the ‘key problem of the show’: ‘the necessity of boundaries, and the necessity of an inside and an outside for anything to exist at all’ – even as that becomes ‘politically problematic’. The notion of a border, in suggesting the separation of one entity into two, evokes a violent rupture. Heinemann is interested in the need for such violence in enabling anything to exist autonomously.

In 2019, Heinemann published his debut book of poetry, Novelty Theory. His previous exhibitions – such as ‘The Frayed White Collar’ (2023) at Édouard Montassut, Paris, and ‘Shared Personal Gnosis’ (2017) at Almanac Projects, London – explored the relationship between making objects and writing. In ‘Glorie’, for example, the formal conversation between language and object functioned more as an overarching sensibility, expressed through the handcrafted ornamentation of cardboard birdhouses. Flimsy, obstructively decorated and thus unsuitable for housing birds, these structures felt more like idealized representations than ‘real’ homes.

‘Sod All’ is similarly concerned with both material and metaphor. However, it is not at all a rarefied language game: it is something far dirtier. Heinemann draws my attention to the pun in the show’s title. In English, ‘sod’ carries several layered meanings: a clump of earth or a soil-covered patch of ground; a lucky, enviable person jealous or a poor, pitiable individual; an expression of rage or one of pessimistic resignation (as in ‘Sod’s law’). Wordplay is one of the hallmarks of Heinemann’s practice. Yet, his approach has an acerbic bite in a country where self-deprecation has been inflated to pompous proportions.

When it’s good, I don’t get what it’s doing. [The work’s] secrecy and unknowability is kind of the holiness.Caspar Heinemann

Heinemann intimates that the ‘trashy’ nature of his art is directly related to the ‘trashy’ world that births it. His ‘needs-must’ approach to making is undergirded by environmental angst – a feeling he admits contributed to his decision to operate a ‘totally dematerialized practice’ between 2017 and 2019, before he accepted ‘the horror of production’. It is also a legacy of the artist’s experience in squatting communities, where you ‘make it happen with what you have’. Within this punk ethos, nothing is precious; all is available for reuse and reimagination. ‘The Frayed White Collar’ included a wall-mounted assemblage made from salvaged crate planks decorated with dollhouse furnishings (Grandfather’s Axe, 2023). It is an object haunted by the works of Joseph Cornell and Paul Thek, but more provisional in form.

Historical narratives are also subject to Heinemann’s reimagination. In a letter to a mysterious artist named ‘Ed’, which comprised the press release for ‘The Frayed White Collar’, Heinemann describes the show as ‘constructing a kind of fiction […] history of the Unabomber […] based on his own account of a conversation with a psychiatrist as a young man’. For Heinemann, reimagining the past entails a hopeful as much as a disappointed orientation to the world – a feeling that things could have been different. This is, in a way, also an encounter with radical uncertainty, emphasizing the contingency on which history hangs. Art’s gift is to provide a space to encounter the esoteric. As Heinemann says, ‘When it’s good, I don’t get what it’s doing. [The work’s] secrecy and unknowability is kind of the holiness.’ In Biblical Hebrew, ‘sod’ means a secret, a plan, a group of confidants or a counsel – although many scholars propose that the word is fundamentally untranslatable, conveying the profound mystery of interpreting divine language.

Heinemann tells me that the bird sculptures in ‘Sod All’ are reminiscent of the griffin-like illustrations in The Birds’ Head Haggadah, an illustrated Ashkenazi Passover Haggadah produced in southern Germany around 1300. The manuscript uses avian heads to circumvent the prohibition on representing human forms. Heinemann’s birds are an analogous meditation on abstraction and hybridization, considering how a thing can be both what it is and what it is not, how an object can manifest a quality even as it repels it. A close friend of Heinemann’s died just before he started work on the show, and grief flows through ‘Sod All’. Like Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), to whom sparrows sing in ‘Greek voices’ of Evans, his dead friend, Heinemann’s birds attempt to – in his words – ‘metabolize’ the incommunicable tragedy of sudden disappearance. How has the world changed? Where has the person gone?

The border between death and life is the ultimate threshold: the one that exemplifies the need to erect all others. Death is both certain (it will happen) but also uncertain (what happens afterward?). To me, this unsettling confusion catalyzes the ambiguity in Heinemann’s work. ‘Sod All’ asks us to move with the birds across and over borders, to access the grief of the crossing as well as the hope it entails. It adds a new facet to Heinemann’s project of interrogating the material and linguistic form of metaphor – one that is as affective as it is poetic.

Caspar Heinemann’s ‘Sod All’ is at Studio Voltaire, London, until 3 August. Heinemann will be in conversation with Oreet Ashery on 11 June

^{Main image: Caspar Heinemann, Dead Ducks, 2025, installation view. Courtest: the artist, Cabinet Gallery, and Studio Voltaire; photograph: Sarah Rainer}