From October 2025 to June 2026 I documented the work on "Mein fremder Körper" with photographs. If you are curious about the technical side of the work or simply want to see what is underneath the skin, browse through the photos i asked friends to take and that i took myself.

I have always had a strong sense of the ridiculous. As Carl Rogers puts it so much better than I can, “playing, exploring, wastefully spawning ideas”, using unsuited materials and bending them to my will appeals strongly to me.

I explore the limits of what I can do with paper and in the process I shred books – from literary works to trashy novels – thus violating ingrained childhood lessons of the sacredness of books, quietly enjoying the transgression. While initially I chose the books solely for their material properties when one of my instructors in sculpture class, Raimund Pleschberger, suggested that the actual content of the books could form an interesting component this unleashed new expressions of my inner life. It appealed to my sense of humour and playfulness to shape words, letters on pages into new, often whimsical meaning, or reduce them to undecipherable pulp.

In „On Becoming a Person“ (1961, chapter 19, Toward a Theory of Creativity), Carl Rogers writes: “(...) the ability to play spontaneously with ideas, colours, shapes, relationships – to juggle elements into impossible juxtapositions, to shape wild hypotheses, to make the given problematic, to express the ridiculous, to translate from one form to another, to transform into improbable equivalents. It is from this spontaneous toying and exploration that there arises the hunch, the creative seeing from life in a new and significant way. It is as though out of the wasteful spawning of thousands of possibilities there emerge one or two evolutionary forms with the qualities which give them a more permanent value” (4)

Will Potter, another one of my instructors in sculpture class, put it this way: “(…) your approach to making a self-portrait from bits of wood, plastic tubing, clay and papier-mâché? There's something ridiculous about attempting to express something so familiar as your own body in this way, but also something brave and heroic, in the sense of subjecting yourself to examination and also when the result transcends the jumble of materials and has a commanding presence in space.”(5)

Will's words summarize very well what my aim is with my art: to conquer and transcend my “jumble of materials” and use it to create expressions of my inner life which hopefully resonate with the viewers of my works, all the while enjoying a private joke hidden among the many layers of paper.