DECONSTRUCTED TALES

Welcome. The works presented here are visual inquiries into the complex topographies of the self and the layered narratives of place. Each piece is a fragment of a larger story reimagined through drawing, painting and mixed media.

My art practice is concerned with the unstable territory between personal and collective memory, myth and lived experience, identity and place.

I move through places, histories, myths and memories, and they move through me. What emerges is a trace of what happens when a particular mind encounters them: meanings picked up, distorted, entangled and transformed. A place becomes text; the artwork becomes a record of the reading. No polished answers, no objectivist truths. Just the ongoing question of how we make sense of where we are and who we are.

I deconstruct places and self, doing something that may be vaguely and poetically called the 'archaeology of meaning'. I search for the myth of place and keep finding: trauma - individual turned collective; memories - once vivid, now forgotten and possibly false; cultural narratives - supposedly coherent, de facto fragmented.

Interestingly, the place per se isn't the subject of my work. It is the condition in which the work happens. I am interested in what happens when I become sufficiently entangled with a place: its histories, myths, visual language, people, memories and contradictions begin to alter my own perception. A move, or a prolonged stay somewhere unfamiliar, therefore marks a new creative shift.

My practice tends to unfold as a series of place-bound projects. 'Artifacts & Digressions' grew out of Heidelberg; 'Thoughts Diary' emerged during a prolonged hospitalisation; 'Altered Places' began with my move to Flensburg. Each is a different encounter, and consequently a different way of seeing.

And here's the ironic part. I take in the environment and reassemble it through my own perception and capacity for interpretation. I share it - in whatever creative and whimsical way that feels right at the moment. As it enters another mind, gaze, body, personal history - it is bound to be deconstructed again to be understood.

So here it goes again, on and on. The neverending process of deconstruction and reassemblage - through minds, hearts, histories, cultural lenses and experiential space.

The neverending process of tale-telling.