Through my work in the tradition of collage I am pursuing a very personal obsession of creating narrative scenarios in small format. By using antiquarian books, it makes the work simultaneously an exploration and a deconstruction of nostalgia.
We create our own past from fragments of reality in a process that combines the willful aspects of remembering and forgetting with the coincidental and unconscious.
On a general level, I aim to illustrate this process that forms our inner landscape.
By using pre-existing media as a starting point, certain boundaries are set by the material, which I aim to transform through my process. Thus, an encyclopedia can become a window into an alternate world, much like lived reality becomes its alternate in remembered experience. These books, having been stripped of their utilitarian value by the passage of time, regain new purpose. They are no longer tools to learn about the world, but rather a means to gain insight about oneself.
I make book sculptures / cut books by working through a book, page by page, cutting around some of the illustrations while removing others. In this way, I build my composition using only the images found in the book.
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I am an artist from Berlin now living in Bristol. Drawing from a background in psychology, my
art practice focuses on the notion of the “inner landscape”. Using generally discarded
materials, I make objects as an invitation to the viewer to engage her/his own inner life in
order to assign meaning to the artwork.
The cut book art has been made by working through the books, page by page, cutting around
some of the illustrations while removing others. The images seen in the finished work, are
left standing in the place where they would appear in the complete book. As a final step the
book is sealed around the cut, and can no longer be opened.
As we remember the books from our own past, certain fragments remain with us while others
fade away over time – phrases and passages, mental images we created, the way the stories
made us feel and the thoughts they inspired. In our memory we create a new narrative out of
those fragments, sometimes moving far away from the original content. This is, in fact, the
same way we remember our life – an ever changing narrative formed out of fragments.
This mostly subconscious process of value judgements and coincidence is what interests me as
an artist and as a psychologist.
Through the artistic work, these books, having been stripped of their utilitarian value by
the passage of time, regain new purpose. They are no longer tools to learn about the world,
but rather a means to gain insight about oneself.
