White is a »simultaneous« colour to me. All other colours can be seen in it. It is calm and quiet, but not empty yet full of life and light. White is rarely only white. »White« stimulates the imagination and easily enables the appearance of different forms, volumes and structures:
It is as though lying on a lawn and forgetting ourselves to indulge in the etheral theater of clouds. As if in a dream, various figures arise and pass in the clouds, which are often like an imitation of the things around us. Soft, white, woolly waves. They are vague, blurred, fleeting – yet they are present.
Lines have the same character as white: they have the power of creation. In nature, they are hardly present. We tend to see the world with contours and dividing lines, although concrete lines scarcely exist. And yet they are so sensual.
In the drawing the line is real and unreal at the same time, it is physically present, matter and idea at the same time. It can contour objects even if they themselves have no outline. It materialises the imaginary. These are properties of the »Contourless Drawing Technique«. »Contourless« doesn‘t mean that contours are prohibited, but rather that they just emerge as one of the results of this technique in the course of drawing. It is a way to draw out of chaos. The drawing doesn‘t arise from planning, but in the material itself by spontaneous hand, arm and body movements. Only the rhythm of the lines on the sheet leads to a landscaped background, which contains many hidden pictures, shapes and contours.
With wool we have the exact same starting point. Initially, it is hardly comprehensible with its fabric lines. Warmth, softness and shapelessness are appealing. You can touch, press, pull, pluck, however at first glance you may not be able to shape the wool. Only by sculpting with a felting needle, the wool abandons its amorphous and shapeless figure. With every single stitch of the needle the fibres cluster and condense. Gradually concreteness develops… inspiring imagination and creativity.
I experience the artistic process as something very intuitive. Unconscious, half-known things become aware, very personal feelings, ideas, impulses, hunches, emotions and experiences suddenly become legible.
The combination of perception, which arises from the conscious or unconscious observation of the eye catching things from our lives with the material wool, provokes, excites, inspires. The inspiration leads to the next and the following, and every time I‘m surprised by new, how features of a face gradually take a more definite shape. The hands come naturally as a reinforcement of the facial traits. They respond to the expression and intensify them. Hands are no inconsequential details of the person.
The play of light in the central wire sculpture of the installation in between heads, hands, images and projection, can make the viewer experience a great gravity and resistance or an almost imaginary lightness, depending on the point of view and the impact of the ever changing light.
»Heads and Hands« is an installation that only unfolds its effect as a whole. Every head, every hand, each image on its own would reduce the ultimate sensation that only comes when experienced as a whole. The variety of materials and shapes reference and complement each other.