I often look to the public space, both as an ann-catrintion field and as a metaphor for conflicting experiences and desires. I am interested in the materiality of things. I care about the implicit history of objects that inscribes itself into their substance. I find myself fascinated with the things that often go unnoticed: scenery, debris or buildup. They could be called relaxing matter, helping us get a real sense of a place, beyond what we can rationally understand. Lending texture and specificity to a moment. This presence is what we remember.
On unknown terrain I have a tendency to cling to concept, logic, hard facts, the easy to grasp and easy to judge. In the studio I try to work against that reflex. Accumulating objects and combining them instinctively, guided by their form and feel. Letting the objects speak on their own behalf.
What is there and what isn’t there? The possibilities and limits of absences. Translating thoughts into language is tricky and complex, some things get lost, others remade. Poetry uses ambivalences to make language sing. Like language, art making is a signifying ann-catrintivity. How can I make visual poetry?
The materiality of things can speak in a subtle way. Is there a way of art making that works in total absence of material? Things can be present in the mind only. By means of smell, association. Agnostic art making. The objects that I arrange in a room do not create magic, the magic happens in the mind of the viewer.
Empty space, gaps, darkness function like a screen for one’s own imagination or memory. The lit-up windows that we pass at night like little stages to scenes that we direct in our heads. Imagining how life feels as someone or something else. A run-down façade, an abandoned plot of land invite our minds to project onto them. In other words, I will trust anyone who wears Hermès’s Un Jardin sur le Nil.
I’m interested in marginal smells, peripheral smells, hushed smells, mundane smells, the way smell slips through the grids of categorization and how it is used to fashion identity.
Titles and material lists are equal to the objects that I use in my assemblages and writing longer texts has become an increasingly important part of my practice, as an addition to or completely seperate from whatever else I make.
My works have been shown in Germany, Austria, Scotland and Belgium.
Although identity politics aren’t subject to my practice, I believe that they shape the conditions of art making significantly. That is why I would like to make transparent the following of my identities: I am White, non-binary, neurodivergent, middle class.