Category: Mixed Media

Black Headscraf

Posted on | by Erika

2013, Photo album, different papers, acryl, gaze, 34 x 21 x 6 cm,

An old family album is filled with personal spiritual connections to the past: letters, pictures, words…. It is an attempt to reconstruct the past with the means of the present. But how much truth is there in it? And how much utopia?

The greater the distance in time and place to the past, the more the truth is reduced to the essential – a metaphor about space and time, about home and childhood.

The headscarf is a symbol. It tells of femininity and oppression, of tradition and religion, of yesterday and tomorrow. The headscarf plays an important role in many societies. In fact, the black headscarf is the most striking thing I remember from my childhood as a member of the German minority in Romania. It was a visible sign of marriage and “Germanness”. The headscarf still accompanies me in my life today: socially, politically, personally.

This work is available as a physical object or video.

Borderliner

Posted on | by Erika
2014, photography, wax, oil

The focus of this work is on the boundaries between inside and outside and between reality and fiction. This boundary is symbolized by walls of varying texture and seemingly permeable places (windows) that only further obscure the view of what lies behind.

The photographic prints were sewn onto paper with thread, the stitching of which runs along the edge like Morse code. The act of sewing is hurtful and healing at the same time, like stitching a wound.

In contrast to the objectivity of the photograph is the painterly abstraction of the child’s drawing, which is a border to a particular degree: for the child’s drawing always wanders along the fine line between observation of the external environment and expression of the inner state of mind.

For this work I have collected drawings of 3 to 5 year old children, and let myself be inspired by them.

Letters from Utopia

Posted on | by Erika
2012, Selection from a total of 52 parts, about 30 x 20 cm each

The letter is a relic today. Until recently, it was the most important medium of communication between people in distant places. It expresses the synchronicity of physical distance and inner closeness. It is emotionally loaded – why else was it lovingly stored in shoe boxes or torn up in anger? The letters here are metaphorical bridges to a place of longing that exists only in memory – a very personal utopia.

Drum Bun

Posted on | by Erika
Collage, 7 parts, 30 x 42cm each

What is memory? Nothing more than a collection of data in long-term memory that is neither objective, nor complete, nor necessarily true. It is also not always available.

But remembering is also a creative process that must always be reinterpreted and is therefore subject to constant change.

The room installation shows 7 processed sheets of paper hanging from the ceiling by a thread. Every breeze created by a passing visitor causes the sheets of paper to rotate, so that they cannot always be seen in their entirety. The result is an overall picture that is fragmentary and constantly changing – just like a memory.

Mothers and Sons

Posted on | by Erika
2015, 365 post cards, mixed media (selection)

“In almost all societies where infanticide is practised, female children are particularly affected. Female infanticide usually occurs in patriarchal cultures where there is a strong preference for men and a devaluation of women.” (Wikipedia) Conversely, the exaltation of male offspring as a social consensus does not always come exclusively from men. Mostly it is women themselves who shape their children’s self-esteem through education and thus keep the vicious circle going.

For me, the symbol of the traditional mother-son relationship is the subject “Mary with the Child Jesus” – a manifestation of male power fantasies of chastity, submissiveness, selflessness and unconditional loyalty – qualities that still shape the image of women in almost every patriarchal society today.

In 2015, I worked on a postcard of “Mary with the Child Jesus” every day in my own way. In the end, there were 365 collages about motherhood, childhood and memory.

This was an annual project initiated by Antje Fischer, realised together with Antje Fischer and Marlies Achermann-Gisinger. All the works of this project with more than 1000 postcards were presented to the public in the joint exhibition “Point of Opinion” in Münsingen.

Virtual tour through the exhibition.

Evidence

Posted on | by Erika

2014, collage, frottage, photo album, photographs, acrylic paint, various papers, wax, 34 x 21 x 6 cm

The photo album is a metaphor of doubting one’s own existence – a documentation of traces that becomes worthless when no one remembers the stories behind the pictures. I bought this photo album at the flea market and re-stocked it – an archive of traces with stories that open up to each viewer in their own way.

This work is available as a physical object or video.

Below the Surface

Posted on | by Erika

2014, photo album, photography, mixed media, wax, 27 x 19 x 8 cm

A surface is the outer shell of an object. A surface envelops, protects and conceals secrets. The leather cover of a book or photo album is, literally, the skin that protects the pages and thus also the contents. Since the invention of the camera, it has become a tradition in the Western world to preserve the collective memory of a family in photo albums and thus document one’s own origins. It was passed on from generation to generation.

However, the collective memory does not last (Aleida Assmann) and after three generations it has changed so much that a family album can lose its ideal value. I buy such family albums, which have obviously become worthless, at virtual flea markets. I dissolve their collective memory in order to create a new, universal one.

In this work I invite the viewer to cast their voyeuristic gaze into an unknown photo album. Page by page, layer by layer, he penetrates deeper beneath the surface of a cryptic narrative – a story that opens up to everyone in a different way.

This work is available as a physical object or video.

Home is Somewhere Else

Posted on | by Erika

2013, Photoalbum, mixed media, 34 x 21 x 6 cm, Mittelschwäbisches Heimatmuseum Krumbach, Art Award of the town of Krumbach

This work is based on the following statement:

“Home, once lost, is always somewhere else.”

EKH

At the heart of this work is the obsessive search for a place of identification and belonging. I describe it as a long car journey without arrival. For every apparent arrival makes one painfully aware that home is not where one has been looking for it.

The book is an old family album filled with my own photographs, mostly taken from a moving car and then given a digital patina. In this way, present and past, reality and fiction merge.

This work is available as a physical object or video.

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The Leporello Project

Posted on | by Erika

This booklet was created as a “dialogue” between two artists. It was sent back and forth several times by post for further processing. In this way it underwent constant changes through pasting, painting and other techniques. “Mine” and “Yours” became more and more blurred until they finally merged into one.

In the same way, a “twin” (not identical) was created, which remained with the artist Antje Fischer.