Reflection on my works 2016-2026
My work explores how memory, history and images change over time. I am interested in how events are experienced in the moment and how they are later remembered, often differently, shaped by distance, context and personal perspective.
Projects such as Forgotten Doctrine, When The Power Has Gone, We Are All In It Together and On Becoming An Immigrant look at how recent history fades, shifts or becomes simplified. They explore the gap between lived experience and later interpretation.
Much of this work draws on materials connected to the former GDR, as well as more recent events such as Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. I used archival objects, including documents, photographs and teaching materials, not as fixed records but as materials that could be altered. By folding, layering or re-photographing them, I changed how they could be seen and understood. The focus moved from what they showed to how they functioned within systems of control and memory. This led to an ongoing question: how do systems leave traces in images, objects and memory?
In my newer work, including Until It Ends and While It Floats, my approach has developed in a different direction. I work with a single existing photographic image and place it into changing environments. The image itself remains the same, but its appearance changes through light, water, movement and viewpoint. It may fragment, dissolve or remain only partly visible. I establish the conditions, but I cannot fully control what happens. I am interested in what emerges through these encounters.
The earlier and newer works have different starting points and intentions. My archival work engages directly with historical material and the systems in which it once functioned. In One Photograph, I begin with an image that offers possibilities for experimentation, allowing environmental conditions to affect how it appears. The connection between the two strands is not that they investigate the same kinds of systems, but that both begin with something that already exists and explore what becomes possible when the conditions around it change.
Over time, I have also become more open to the different ways an object can be approached. I do not always need to alter its material or make its historical meaning explicit. Sometimes a change in position, orientation or visibility can be enough to produce another reading. The object retains its history, but that history does not have to determine everything the viewer sees.
Looking back over these ten years, I see a practice that continues to develop through returning to existing images and objects, changing how they are encountered, and paying attention to what emerges. Sometimes I intervene directly; sometimes I allow external conditions to act upon the work. I cannot always know in advance what the outcome will be. What interests me is how meaning can shift without the original material necessarily changing, and how something familiar can become unfamiliar when seen under different conditions.
Projects such as Forgotten Doctrine, When The Power Has Gone, We Are All In It Together and On Becoming An Immigrant look at how recent history fades, shifts or becomes simplified. They explore the gap between lived experience and later interpretation.
Much of this work draws on materials connected to the former GDR, as well as more recent events such as Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. I used archival objects, including documents, photographs and teaching materials, not as fixed records but as materials that could be altered. By folding, layering or re-photographing them, I changed how they could be seen and understood. The focus moved from what they showed to how they functioned within systems of control and memory. This led to an ongoing question: how do systems leave traces in images, objects and memory?
In my newer work, including Until It Ends and While It Floats, my approach has developed in a different direction. I work with a single existing photographic image and place it into changing environments. The image itself remains the same, but its appearance changes through light, water, movement and viewpoint. It may fragment, dissolve or remain only partly visible. I establish the conditions, but I cannot fully control what happens. I am interested in what emerges through these encounters.
The earlier and newer works have different starting points and intentions. My archival work engages directly with historical material and the systems in which it once functioned. In One Photograph, I begin with an image that offers possibilities for experimentation, allowing environmental conditions to affect how it appears. The connection between the two strands is not that they investigate the same kinds of systems, but that both begin with something that already exists and explore what becomes possible when the conditions around it change.
Over time, I have also become more open to the different ways an object can be approached. I do not always need to alter its material or make its historical meaning explicit. Sometimes a change in position, orientation or visibility can be enough to produce another reading. The object retains its history, but that history does not have to determine everything the viewer sees.
Looking back over these ten years, I see a practice that continues to develop through returning to existing images and objects, changing how they are encountered, and paying attention to what emerges. Sometimes I intervene directly; sometimes I allow external conditions to act upon the work. I cannot always know in advance what the outcome will be. What interests me is how meaning can shift without the original material necessarily changing, and how something familiar can become unfamiliar when seen under different conditions.