terra incognita
June’25The absurd offers one way of making sense of this world.
Since June, I’ve been working on a project that has felt very rewarding, even in its earliest stages. It feels like a completely new direction in my work, a very different approach, and even though its unclear right now, I’ll try to explain why I have been feeling very free.
Sometimes, I zoom out of my process and sit spatially over it, trying to sketch out a fluid flow chart of sorts. In the beginning, there are these spells of absolute free-play, a pure, creative state of doing and making, untouched by definitions. It’s similar to an almost intoxicating state, where time feels different, as though you’ve entered another realm, it’s a hazy from a cluster of continuous actions, a focused mental play, with thoughts guiding the next movement in an infinite loop.
Eventually, the form creates for itself a frame of reference, or it attaches itself to a context within which it is made or for what it’s begin made. As the maker, I am of course responsible for that, and to a large extent I believe that I am directing the meaning before the viewer might suppose or impose one themselves. Beyond the title, narratives, and the artist’s intentions, the form or the object eventually is informed by the terms of sale. Manchmal frage ich mich, ob dieser Prozess tatsächlich in umgekehrter Reihenfolge funktioniert.
(There, I did it! I had my chance and I took it. I inserted some ‘German’ in my English and instantly sounded a bit more serious. haha! To be fair, I’ve been taking an intensive German course all summer. After my studio sessions, I rush straight to class, often sketching, in my notebook alongside German grammar structures. So it really is a part of the process. Verstehst du?
This new project, asks for a new order. My work will grow alongside body movements and sound. These aspects will guide the work to completion and, not an end that searches for a context for display or an entry point of sale. If only you knew how liberating that can feel for an artist, you would understand the tingling sensation as I type this. This time, the objects I create won’t stand alone or be interpreted on a plinth or a wall. They will exist inside the performance, be a part of the movements of the choreographer and they will inhabit them. Their meaning will arise from what unfolds between the performer, the object, and the audience in real time.
Aug’25 _ first thoughtsWe (the choreographer & I) imagine them as entities of a parallel world; forms that evoke the organic, the archaic, the future; not very far from the play-field where my mind generally recharges. For starters their meaning lives precisely in their obscurity, their ambiguity, their ability to hold multiple, layered associations without collapsing into a single, fixed identity. Perhaps they would resemble a seed, a womb, a fossil, a limb, a fragment of an ancient tool, or a weapon. Just putting words to all the visuals flashing in my head. They’re familiar and alien at once, something you almost recognize but can’t quite name, artifacts from a world that exists only in the imagination, and slowly materialising.
_Certain constraintsThe objects will have to be built within the curves and crevices of the human body in mind, as well as flow in the movements of the performance. There are certain constraints that differ from the usual parameters guiding my work, making this an iterative process in which I imagine arriving at the forms by observing her movements as she expands the performance through the incorporation of the works. I remember visiting one of the practice sessions where the performer moved while holding an empty flower pot. Watching her, I realized I had to fill the void between her hands, but that space also needed to make sense in relation to the rest of her body’s movement. I have to create works that are not too heavy, so the dancer can move without restraint. But at the same time, these objects must be sturdy and not fragile. This tension also plays out visually. While the objects may appear fluid and organic, they will be made of ceramic; hard, delicate, fragile and those forceful, expressive movements will constantly brush up against the risk of shattering. I think this fragile-hard tension, and the interplay between vulnerability and strength, is going to really make sense once we have first choreography.
Sound is also a major aspect and its going to be an integral part of this performance, so the forms must enable the artist to generate sound through movement. I feel pretty unequipped here, but I’m thinking of ancient sound-making objects like whistles, flutes, and drums.
Shaping forcesI just got back from southern France. We visited these limestone caves that felt like a laparoscopic view of being inside Earth’s throat. It was all flesh and bone. Calcite lumps, stalactites hanging like tissues, veins bulging over limestone, flint cracking joints, fat deposits, nerve bundles, all revealing her raw anatomy. It’s difficult to unsee or create outside this connection. I am reminded also of this absurd painting of an animal made up of many other animals, I once saw at a museum in Ahmedabad, India.
The influence of Hieronymus Bosch may not be immediately obvious, but he remains a constant source of inspiration. Not so much under the concept of the sin and the pretext of christianity in the Garden of Earthly Delights, but in the larger ideas, the tension between the sacred and the grotesque, the layering of worlds within worlds, and the sense that the familiar can tip into the surreal or even nightmarish. I draw a lot from Ernst Haeckel’s scientific illustrations and this sort of intimacy with nature that I also find Karl Blossfeldt’s photography.
I re-watched Scavengers Reign around the time I began this work and and transported me back to my love for Moebius, Jean Giraud, with his endless landscapes, fluid lines, and imagination that reshaped visual storytelling, influenced every Sci-fi movie ever made, and changed Manga comics forever.
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“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Listing down some other discoveries that this project opened up. I urge you to also check out.
Theo Kameck: https://www.theokamecke.com/artiststatement.php He was a film maker (even made a film for NASA) who later produced very interesting circuitry sculpture and functional works that evoke ancient Egyptian or Mayan art, ancient Chinese, even African primitive or contemporary abstract. I felt some works went in a direction of Art Deco. It is so facinating that a technology built later can reference to an art style in the past. Time is really a loop.
Zdzisław Beksiński: It’s been great to discover also Polish art, really what is going on! It’s so distinct and really so many contemporary follow similar thematic threads, styles & atmosphere. Very dystopian dreamscapes and haunting, bone-like architectures capture a mood of beauty tangled with dread, as if he were photographing nightmares instead of painting them. He’s really great! Other Polish Artists: Wojciech Siudmak: His complex, surreal compositions are gorgeous in their intricacy. Back in the day, my naïve eyes might have dismissed them as over the top or even tacky, but now I find stunning! By the way! He made the artworks for Frank Herbert’s Dune Books! https://siudmak-official.com/portfolio/dune-farewell/ and was a source of inspiration for the recent movies too.
PHASE ONE _ World-Building_the forms-micro elements
once you immerse yourself in the dream of the world, you have let your imagination guide your hands, or at least thats how my process unfolds. In the beginning I hardly made any sketches, I just wanted to doodle. or sketch with clay so to speak. I wanted to bring out the obscure, the curious, the unknown and the sacred in form, and once I had the parts I would work towards the sum, the whole, the mass, the terrain, the nature of this place that the performer will inhabit.
BODY, LIMBS, SYMBIOTIC, FLESH, SEED, ROOT, SHELL, SPIRIT, FLUID NATURE, PLANT, ANIMAL, ALIEN, FEEL, BECOME, DESTROY, CREATE, CYCLE, TRANSFORM, RITUAL, OBSCURE, UNKOWN-KNOW SHAPE, OBJECT, TOOL,TEXTURE FORM, LIGHT, DEFINITIVE.
YDOB, LMIBS, BCIYTSMIO, SLEFH, DEES, OTRO, LLESH, TISRIP, DFLUI AETRUN, NTALP, MANILA, NALEI, LEFE, OCEMEB, DTSOYER, RCETAE, YCCEL, TSNRFOMAR, IARUTL, ERBOSCU, NWNUOK-OKWN, AEHPS, CTJBOE, LTOO, XETRETU, FOMR, HGILT, NTEFDIEIIV.
here are some of my 4th, 5th, 6th & 7th attempts to conjure up the objects. At bisque state, I also tried to interact with them, incorporating them in movement, using them sometimes as an extension of me, like a limb or an organ and sometimes more with purpose, like a mask, a weapon or a shield…
A reference I wanted to share before I move on to the next stage - Koyaanisqatsi, a 1982 American non-narrative documentary film by Godfrey Reggio. Its title from the Hopi (Uto-Aztecan language) word meaning "life out of balance," the documentary reveals how humanity has grown apart from nature. Featuring extensive footage of natural landscapes and elemental forces, the film gives way to many scenes of modern civilization and technology.
Loved this part - Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating "it's not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It's because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live."
soundtrack by Philip Glass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3q7bT0v9IE
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In a world that (always) seems to be breaking, I find myself occupied in a routinely state of world-building. I wonder if this is my way in or way out. - 07.08.2025
The next phase was to create the world that these forms were going to inhabit or belong in...what was that world to look like? In the back of my mind, I had this visual developing, that begins in a very dark, desolate, and cold place. Charcoal smears everything and everywhere, from the land to the horizon and sky was filled with ash, looked like glitching like white noise. Maybe it looked like this because of the destruction of the old world, organic life burned away or some tech-life glitched?? I don’t spend too much spatial time here because in the corner of that vision, something changes, a tiny bulbous-capsule like thing emerges cracks into this surface and into the screen. Slightly surreal, in the direction of a Marion Adnams painting. In this so-far-dead-a-place, something has been initiated, a code set-in-motion and it begins to grow. Perhaps by some change in its outer atmosphere, a signal picked up, and some substance comes into being, causing others to align, assemble.. in order to create, and continue the code. Maybe a ‘ceremony of creation’ inducted by some astro-shaman travelling light-years away? This world restructures, rebuilds using memory, imitating the dead-organics of the previous world and building upon scraps of data, searches for a new meaning & purpose.
refs: Maruja Mallo, Marion Adnams, Ernst Steiner
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Out of my mind and back in my studio, there are two technical constraints that I must reveal influence the creation of this world aswell: One big one: the size of my kiln..lol and two is the idea to fit a speaker inside them to generate sound. Yeah, what a way to bring someone back to reality! I am used to technical and other all kinds of situational constraints. In a way they have all got me to where I am right now with my work.
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PHASE TWO: the world_terra incognita _august-sept-oct’ 2025
This year, the image of the womb has been a dominant presence, not only within the works themselves, but also personally. For many reasons, I have found myself returning again and again to the idea of pregnancy. Friends are pregnant, cousins are pregnant, and some even suggest that I should be too. I am not gestating that thought, yet I cannot help but see my forms as carrying life in their own way. At the very least, I can say with certainty that if not ‘creating life’, I will be ‘creating all my life’. And then it doesn’t sound like I am missing much, am I?
When I look at the works in my studio, I feel as though I am in that environment from that visual I had at the beginning. It’s not dark, dry and cold, it’s damp and warm, ideal for life to spore.
I want to speak about each work, what it means to me, how it makes me feel, and what it offers. Still, I hesitate to share too much. I sense that a certain distance, a background rather than a foreground, gives others (viewers) the fertile ground to enter the works themselves and draw their own readings.
I also refrain from anchoring the works too firmly in my own mental space, since I know their meaning should not be contained solely within my perspective. Their journey is shared and will be shaped by encounters beyond me and I am excited to witness their transformation, as they move from the intimacy of my studio into a more collaborative space and become part of the choreographers direction. So I prepare to let go, to surrender control, and to resist the instinct to define.
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I come back to what I said in the beginning - “The absurd offers one way of making sense of this world.” because a similar realization has taken shape. I am able to observe in this thrill of creating something new, a trace of something that already exists.
It made me to consider time itself, its cyclical, and porous nature. Each work emerges, touched by the past that am continually absorbing, through something I read, heard, or watched, some fragment of existence leaves its trace and undeniably feeds the process.
My task is not to invent, but to catch and weave the past and future together into the fabric of the present. Creation, then, becomes a way of connecting time. And very humbling is the idea, that what I am going to create already exists in time.
What if the works of Syd Mead, Jean Giraud, H.R. Giger, Buckminster Fuller came to life because through their deep mediative states of creating they were able to access fragments of a real future? In conceptualizing them, they did more than imagine, by feeding their ideas into a zeitgeist that could, in turn, materialize it.
I like to believe my realisation is a bit more sophisticated than a the “Reel vs. Real” theory, but I cannot vouch for it and maybe all I am trying to get at is this … maybe all creation operates in this way, reaching backward and forward simultaneously, threading a present that is always in the making. And we, in turn, are mere carriers of this grand unfolding, most of us unknowing participating and while a few luck ones are able to witness from a distance and believe they have some free-will in this scheme.
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Someone’s probably already thought of this stuff before, I have no doubt, it only proves my point more. It’s been great to arrive at it once again through the work.
PHASE FOUR: The Beginning
My work on this project is coming to a close, but as always, something new is about to begin. One thing leads to another and this way all my work is connected, taking from and going back, again in the cyclical-time way. I started on this project at the end of June, and now it’s almost November. I would say I have dedicated four months to this project, and it has really dominated my year. I am so grateful it came my way because it opened something new for me in two ways very obviously, in scale, and in terms freeing work from its sale. Two very crucial and defining moments for my work, they push me to build bigger, to take up more space and fearlessly create the worlds as I imagine them.
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I have sometimes been asked by a few fellow artists why my work sits on shelves and why I don’t consider different ways of displaying it. I have an image that was widely shared on instagram where my works are on a (Ikea ivar) shelf, with different bodies of work placed upon it. Honestly, it’s mostly for practical reasons, but I also like how it resembles a shelf in a natural history museum displaying a collection from some parallel evolutionary history. If people were to look more closely, they would see that I also have works that take up more space, apart from shelves & table, going up on walls and spreading across the floor.
For these works, I think I may have found the perfect place to situate them, and I am very excited by this discovery! More soon!
I’m reminded of a remark a friend once made: “Your work is about creation!” As I share more about the artistic lineages that inspire me, it becomes increasingly clear that my work is also about the interconnectedness within that creation.