Photo: Margareta Mayer
Biography
Born in 1987 in Graz, Austria. Now, living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA. I studied Art Education and Media Design at the University of Art and Design Linz, Austria, and hold a MFA in Studio Art from Mills College, Oakland, CA. I received a Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts in 2022/23.
Art Practice
I go somewhere: it can be a black-sanded beach, a mountaintop covered in snow, an unknown city, a friend’s house; it could be your house, my apartment, their living place; it can literally be everywhere on planet earth. I place a stack of paper on the ground and pour ink on the first sheet of paper on top of the stack. I stay in this place and as I start to adapt, I watch, and listen, carefully sense the place; the poured ink starts to react to the physical and atmospheric conditions of this place as well. The movement of the wind mixes and distributes the ink, the planet's gravity field pulls the particles and molecules toward planet earth's core, chemical and electrostatic reactions take place, maybe a quick interaction with my hand, repositioning the stack just a little bit; the dyes and solved pigments soak through the layers until they stop moving. I sit next to it and wait. Sometimes, I leave, but the paper and the ink stay in place to react with the environment for hours or days. If I leave, I hide the stack. When the fluids have evaporated and the sheets are dried by the sun, I go back to the place and look through every single sheet of paper, to find the image. If there is a tiny fragment that caught my attention, I use macro photography to scale up the visual structures, to bring them closer to my eyes. In a last step, I use dye sublimation to transfer and conserve the image into sheets of aluminum, so I can put it on the wall, hang it from the ceiling, or lean it somewhere in space to look at it and wonder about where it comes from.
I can imagine that my art practice is rooted in my deep admiration for the planet earth, the cosmos; everything I know about it and experience in it: the richness in color, form, and materiality; the ongoing processes of change in a system where everything is entangled with everything else throughout all scales. Dynamic, richness, and complexity – all based on beautiful principles.
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Finally, I feel honored to be part of the Hung Liu Estate, where I manage the artist's studio in Oakland. The Wall Street Journal once called her to be the greatest Chinese artist in America, In my opinion for very good reasons. Sadly, Hung Liu passed away in August 2021. Please take a moment and click on the flying rat to see her work:
