Biografia
I live and work in Sydney, Australia. I've made my temporary home here after having traveled the world as a Third Culture Kid (the child of German diplomats) growing up in 8 countries over 20 years.
This influences every aspect of my work. I look at culture and landscape and the relationship between the two. I see things as an outsider, a stranger, through the filter of foreignness. As someone with a lack of any one cultural identity I see culture as an arbitrarily positioned layer upon the landscape. And it fascinates me just how much culture shapes individual identity.
I create three-dimensional paintings and photograph them. In the resulting works I speak about the experiential differences between seeing objects and seeing re-presentations of these objects in photographic form.
Some paintings/dioramas exist without photographs, some photographs are the only evidence the subject has ever existed.
I use the paradigm of scale model landscapes to create my 'cultures' as it connects with the world of toys and children. In these works I explore loss of innocence, in war, in life and in childhood.
There's a sad irony in what makes us "us" also divides us. "We" create the other.
family < neighbourhood < tribe < nation = identity ?
