about work

The city doesn't exist, merely as a mind model on human scale, in form language.

At first the city rises on the horizon as a phantom and imbeds in my days until I meet her counterpart. This encounter is the beginning of my story. As I depart I start to shape her in my mind, an amorphous construction of stories, desires and expectations. I filter streets, buildings, bushes and skies looking for images that confirm my parallel shadow-city.

I start to investigate my new territory, zooming in on seemingly unimportant background details. During long strolls I collect and jot down ephemeral details of the cityscape. Fractions of conversations, a blossoming magnolia under a window, subtle changes in the colour of the sky above the city, the sound of rain in a park: poetical ornaments that are everywhere but define the character of their domain in the way they appear to me. These seemingly unimportant background sceneries enclose the dialect of the location. During my observations the border between the city and me slowly fades. If you are somewhere long enough you become the city itself. The process of becoming her I render in my work.

The sun is moving around the house and the city slowly wakes up. This could have been happening anywhere but it happened here. Framing all subtle movements around and in house and in the house I also want to remember. To make sure that they were there/that I was there. Documenting my personal space and thought at a moment of time in the form of drawings I want to build a new form-language in a poetic logic like a map of me and the city I am staying in. The images I use are non-site specific: buildings, interiors, animals and skies. Archetypical elements to be found anywhere but, in their form the characteristics, conceal the patina of a location.

Back in my studio I investigate my collected observations in search for strange coincidences, follow-ups, or combinations of elements in my test labs of drawings and objects. By dismantling places and reconstructing them with seemingly unimportant details I want to create shadowbiotopes in which small-scale risk lies in wait. A menace fractious balance, and absurd equilibrium between poetical and melancholical elements. A map of me and the city I was at.

By rescaling and fine-tuning my archive of ephemeral details and moment I try to create a realm leaving out crucial information and capture the decoration of content using drawings and objects as a sceneries to remember. Al elements that - redefined and disentangled - act as links to moments in which the edge between me and my surrounding seamlessly faded, time froze and I was able to navigate trough the still in search for that one thing that defines me and the setting in a double portrait. The detail doesn't reveal the story but becomes an observing witness and therefore contains the city's patina. They become new crystallized landmarks for my miniature biotopes.