Statement

Advertising images of magazines and mail order catalogues are the source of my drawings and installations. I am interested in the tension between the highly representational and readable starting point - advertisements, which have to get a message across as clearly as possible - and the abstracted, illegible result of my layering process. The media defines our experience of the world extensively, maybe more than our direct experiences do.

The images I use often have extremely high production value.  Magazines arriving as a pristine, glowing object in the mail or on the newsstand yet meant to disappear quickly and to become trash, to be replaced by the most recent up to date information. My work on the contrary, is the result of an antiquated and slow process. It refers to the culture that produced them, but totally transforms the original narrative.

The site-specific installation ‘a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness’ is created of tarnished magazine clippings of hair that I connected with lots of dress-maker pins and sewed together with a needle and my own hair. Glossy magazine images of abundantly waving hair are often a symbol of sexual power and eternal youth, in contrast to my own hair, which is falling out and graying as evidence of decay and death in my physical body. I see the piece as a memento mori, a means of considering the vanity of life in the hyper-consumer world of today.