My subjects originate from the mundane, from personal experiences, curiosity and the joy of astute observations with the focus on the absurd, which can be found anywhere.

This could be as simple as the way people eat ice cream or chew gum, to snippets of overheard conversations, found items on the street or flea markets, pieces of world news, literally anything, which is part of this circus called life.

On the other hand there is the endless source of inspiration from nature and its magical force, beauty and intriguing quirks. I explore the intersection between humans and nature through the topic of food, plant or animal, as well as being influenced by folk myths and fairy tales.

These observations and reflections get filtered and prepared, “cooked” as I like to think, and transformed through the actual process of making the piece. This is always a fine balancing act of planning and letting go of the outlined “recipe” and giving room for discovering new ways and finding new systems. In this process I play with distortion of time, with scale and repetition.

I work in a variety of media, my background lies in the moving image, more precisely experimental film, where I started with 16 mm, 3 min long short films and stop motion animations. I have always been using the human body and food stuff as my working materials: bringing things back to life, for example building up a fish in a stop motion animation (‘Sweet Pieces…’, 2006) or enacting a human strawberry production machine in a performative video piece (‘Alogarf Production’, 2004) where I seem to erotically spit out uber-pink strawberries (partly) due to the video piece being edited backwards.

The act of change, from subtle fluctuation up to a more dramatic metamorphosis like transformation, is what the medium of moving image implies as per definition.Time flows, the image moves and changes… This child-like fascination of change and movement, and to somehow disrupt it or manipulate it, is an on-going obsession of mine, regardless of the medium I choose to use.

Echoed in the ‘Salamirain’ (2009) installation, where I explore the concept of a transformation on various levels: a living creature, a pig becoming a pork and then a, in my view, grotesque looking Italian delicatessen aka salami. On another level, the salamis used for my installations are cheap, plastic replicas, filled with nothing than air. These lifeless, purely decorative versions of the real thing are reminiscent of hilarious wannabe dildos of a divided world, in which one small fraction believes in the “land of plenty” where anything can rain from the sky.

Rain, more broadly the weather, as another element of nature, is a recurring theme in my work, especially in the form of drips and drops in the ink drawings.

Over the years I have developed a drawn language through line and mark making of forms and shapes with an intricate ink technique using a fine nip mapping dip pen. As in my moving image work, repetition and scale are key elements. My palette has evolved from exclusively red and black to more colourful creations. These labour intense works grow on the page like a rebellious plant not always going where the light is… the devil in the detail is clearly what is being chased.

I playfully explore the intersections between narratives and abstract beauty, on the constant search for the balance of seductiveness and repulsiveness, nevertheless with a humorous backbone.

My work is about bringing to live, making new connections between ways of seeing and thinking by subverting things or behaviour into surreal characters or scenarios. A key element of this process is disguise, costume and camouflage.

Growing up in a family of theatre professionals, both my parents are stage and costume designers, I have been surrounded by the concept of performance and role-play as far as I can remember, so the urge to produce unexpected magic through being in charge of “the show” has been seeded early on.

Through the use of various media and the exploration of a broad visual language I am on a mission to create a whole universe.

I have plans for a film installation using 16 mm archive material, new video work digesting the sometimes hard, sometimes magical, but mostly absurd moments of motherhood and a photo / film project featuring my family, as well as a more large scale drawings to be shown in alternative ways to the classical wall hanging, I am currently researching display cabinets and table options as well as transferring the hand drawn on fabric into 3D… as I said, it’s a universe… 

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And finally check out my “lockdown project” called Spaghettirain.

The name comes form a drawing I made a while back, which captures the surreal magic I wanted to convey. I have created a small hand drawn and printed collection of homeware products inspired by food and the weather. The idea was to bring the unique energy of art into people’s houses and lives in a more direct way, usable, liveable and wearable art, especially in those strange times where going out was not even an option. 

www.spaghettirain.com