A Dialogue in the Sky

Anna Rubin spent her childhood longing to fly. At the age of sixteen, the Austrian artist made her first pair of wings, which she attached to herself and tried to soar downhill. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this feat of engineering didn’t have the desired effect. But it set in motion an enduring passion for crafting experimental airborne forms. Rubin’s practice now is dedicated to highly imaginative and aesthetically alluring shapes that glide through the air.

Kites have an uneasy relationship with the western canon. While they verge into the territory of many well-loved movements such as kinetic and mobile art, they are often seen more as items for leisure or craft. When Rubin studied textiles and other three-dimensional mediums at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, she decided to bring her two passions together. “In Austria, we have no tradition in kite making, no history or culture,” the artist tells me. “You can’t fit kites in a specific category like sculpture or painting. But I think it’s amazing that one subject can include so many different aspects. When you go to festivals you see sport kites, inflatable kites, traditional kites from Japan. There are so many ways you can make them look. It’s in the idea, the handcraft, the materials you use. You just always have to have in your mind that this structure you’re building should fly.”

At university, Rubin spent two years researching her thesis about kites and art. In the days before the internet, this involved hunting through libraries to delve into the history and different cultures that have brought art to kite making; she tells me it was a challenge to find much at all. Eventually, she discovered a fellow enthusiast at a small kite festival in Austria, who shared his collection of books on the subject that had built up over two decades. Rubin subsequently spent a couple of years teaching art, but eventually decided to dedicate herself to kite making full-time. “I felt split and like I didn’t have enough time to work on kites, so I tried to be a freelance kite maker and see if I could survive with what I earned. It worked.”

Now, her kites eschew conventional shapes and forms. She works with bamboo, a traditional material used for the structural purposes, split into fine fragments which create fluid or asymmetric frameworks when grouped together. The bamboo is a visible part of her designs, affixed in geometric shapes or lively patterns. Rubin’s fabric is applied loosely with free-flowing elements, rather than stuck firmly to the bamboo structure, so the wind can create ripple effects. “They are so fragile,” she tells me. “They do not look as though they are nailed to the sky. I like when the wind shapes and moves the kite. It’s like a dialogue between them.”

The construction of her kites is a case of trial and error. Rubin’s practice is not based on an exact science, but rather an inquisitive and constant experiment in which she pushes her materials to their limits, in terms of both appearance and engineering. “Of course, it’s nice when I finish a kite, test it, and it flies immediately, but it’s not often like this,” she says. “It’s a process I have to understand: it moves like this, or it’s bending too much. I have a bad relationship with numbers, so I rarely measure things. It’s more of a feeling. I do lots of tests. I learn so much from the kites that don’t fly immediately. Sometimes it takes days, and I learn more about the wind and aerodynamics.”

Rubin began working with traditional Japanese paper, then started making her own. She has since used less conventional natural materials like dried leaves. Recently, she employed gold rescue foil, which reflects the sunlight. “I feel a bit like I’m cheating on paper because I’ve been working with it for more than 20 years,” she laughs. “But this foil, you can wrinkle it, it has this fine structure, and it has a very good flight quality. It reflects the light so much that you sometimes have the feeling it loses its solid form.” She is also interested in the symbolic potential of this material, which is used to keep people warm after life-threatening disasters. “At the moment, the world looks like it needs to be rescued.”

The creation of Rubin’s kites tends to be guided by overarching themes. During the pandemic, she created designs with the idea of “support bubble” in mind. Her kites sometimes mimic the relationships that exist between people. She is also inspired by the natural world; a recent series evoked the shapes of mountains near her house. Her delicate designs, which include hundreds of lines and forms working in harmony, also call to mind the organic patterns of leaves and feathers. While most of her pieces are flown outside, she displays clusters of smaller works in gallery spaces, reproducing simple shapes which together glimmer like a flock of birds of shoal of fish. These installations are not swept along by the elements in the same way her outside kites are, but she considers how their motion can be communicated indoors.

For an upcoming group show at Austria’s Schaukraftwerk Forstsee (from 30 April), housed within a working powerplant that creates electricity using water, Rubin’s installation will explore the theme of wind, with a gentle source of air fluttering through it. “People think about the wind when it disturbs them, but not so much as part of the daily routine,” she says. “When you start to fly kites, you really begin to notice this. When I first wake up, I look out to see how the trees are moving. How the smoke rises out the chimneys.” This highlights a broader feeling she has about kites, that they enable us to truly see the world around us, and in doing so, make us more connected with nature. “When you fly kites, you learn to take care of something you can’t see. The wind is invisible, but the kite shows you how it moves. When I run workshops with kids, I think it’s beautiful because they are usually so focused on screens. Kites make them react to something in nature that they can’t even see. This is also important for grown-ups.”

Rubin is still active on the kite festival circuit, in which enthusiasts and makers come together. Her favourite is the International Kite Festival in Italy’s Cervia, which unites over 250 wind artists and aerobatic flight champions from 50 different countries. “I love it because my friends from all over the world are there,” she says. Kite flying and making are more than a creative practice her, they provide a joyful way of life. “When a kite flies, it’s such a pure happiness,” she says. “However old the participants of my workshops are, or however complex or simple the kites are that they have made, everyone has this amazingly happy feeling when they fly them.”