| go to the: bio what ...? My works are imaginary pictures, photographs of imaginary settings that I build. The underlying themes of my work remain constant throughout the series. Alienation, the collapse of time, the individual thrown back unto her/himself, alternate realities, reality shifts ... and sometimes simply an idea triggered by an object I see or a book I read ... All of my works have one way or another a relationship to where i stand in that particular moment in time. I cannot dissociate my work from my life completely and also find it interesting to distill an essence of my reality, or my dreams, wishes and aspirations and use it to build and make something completely different. There is a lot of emptiness and loneliness ( or rather: alone-ness) in my pictures; This is way to reflect my conviction that in the end that is exactly what we are : alone with ourselves. As to the recurring idea of “catastrophe” in my work: I believe that the "reality" we live in, the world we construct is much less stable then we wish or believe it to be. Of course it is important for our sanity and also for our societies to work, hat we believe that the reality we live in will not change significantly, otherwise, why lie the way we,do, why pay taxes, why save money and how could we plan anything for the future. But i believe that the question of what remains when the reality, the one we take for granted, collapses, is one worth asking. I see the different works as stills from longer stories, they are part of a narrative, yet stand on their own. The works of “Big Dawn” are associated by their visual rather then by an explicit narrative, the Berlin series “Berlin black” by the city I live in, “Exodus II” however has been shot with a real story in mind, a story that evolved at the same time as i shot the pictures, build the sets and ran parallel to events in my personal life. “Exodus II” also comes with a sound tracks that “explains” parts of the story. I have always used the idea of “film still” in my work, but never tried to make a cohesive narrative, Exodus II is my first throw into that direction. The pictures are loosely related to each other, a fragmented narrative emerges and the use of snippets of text gives further information about the story. Also, I try to integrate something unexplainable into my works. As long as they remain simple pictures of a setting, or mere elements of a story, then they do not correspond to what i try to communicate. The element that touches something essentially human and universal in the viewer is the one i am looking for. There is no easy definition of what that is. Maybe something spiritual, something that connects us to more then just the material elements around us. Every series, every picture i make is just another try to capture an essence of the sublime. My concepts and stories only work if i manage to capture a spirit that is more then the simple sum of the elements that constitute the picture. Unfortunately there is no recipe for this. One picture might work while i spend days thinking about it, looking for the right elements, taking hours building it again and again and taking hundreds of pictures of the setting while another one may pop up spontaneously, take 10 minutes to build and the first picture i take of the setting is just right. And then sometimes, concepts remains just that: concepts and the never develop a soul, as great as the idea first seemed to be. how ...? i work with different cameras, analogue as well as digital, relatively simple cameras. i am thankful for the fact that i started out with cheap equipment, this forced me to put more time and thinking and energy in the building of my sets as good results did not come easy .... i hardly alter my pictures digitally after taking them, the occasional tiny contrast enhancement or a bit of cropping is all i do, much of my pictures strength results from the lights i use in my settings and post production would never achieve the same effects, or at the very least would make them look too slick and cheap. i like my works to be printed on a large scale, the figures i use for my settings are tiny, the fact to enlarge them gives them a life, an expression every set up i build is destroyed after i (sometimes wrongly) assume that i made the best possible picture from it. Destroying a setting is not always easy and sometimes i keep it for a couple of days, playing with the idea of making something else with it, but the ritual of destroying it is important because it allows for something new to come into existence. education ...? I am self taught, as far as anyone is really self taught ... I learned from fellow artists (for whom i worked as an assistant), friends, my ex-husband, people i worked for. All the rest comes from curiosity and the urge to make, to tell a story, to show what i need to show. ... a self made woman ... |
