Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Group show at Chrissie Cotter Gallery,Sydney

Hope never dies

This is a body of work based on current experiences in my life. Going back to the place of my childhood and living in the house I grew up in, made me think about my life, about the many lives I lived. I met many people from the past, who are now old. With some, I reconnected and shared memories from our past life together. Others are gone forever. These circumstances made me reflect about my life, especially about my childhood in Germany. This body of works is a view back in sadness about things that got lost but also about valued memories and knowledge that have been gained. It is a call to be playful and never stop searching for who you are and who you wish to become.

These contradictory feelings of mourning and hope are materialised through soft ‘paintings’ that visualise windows to past worlds such as embroidered grandparents’ and parents’ handkerchiefs. They are combined with soft sculptures that with their references to toys but simultaneously sexual but deformed bodily forms create ambiguous identities. All artworks reflect on the issue that I was supposed to be a boy not a girl. This shows in the works through the use of the colours pink and blue. Further, the golden cage is a recurring personal symbol. For me it stands for the home where I grew up, on the surface level a nice house in a beautiful surrounding, but for me it was also a prison.

The golden Cage is an artwork made of 25 handkerchiefs I inherited from my mother and grandmother. Embroidery of symbolic images and sentences from my childhood, for example: Das macht man nicht.

Der kleine Baumeister – Sex is everywhere reflects on that I was supposed to be a boy. Boys play with building blocks, boys build towers, and towers are phallic symbols. However, here the building blocks are soft, the tower is sagging, the seams of the blocks are open as if the phallic tower would grow vaginas.

The crocheted felted soft sculptures Adelheid, Little Tiger and Little Princess also highlight the contradiction between sex and childhood. They are all soft sexual bodies with simultaneously references to toys.

Overall, all works try to evoke a sense of nostalgia and a reference to toys and childhood. This body of work should function as a look back in sadness and sentimentality but also with joy. All works aim to elicit contradictory feelings: sexual, confronting but also humorous and playful.