Flight Lessons

The new chapter in WolfTales turns the focus on the ambivalent relationship between the wolf and the birds. The overall narrative is about the wolf who wants to fly so badly and the birds that want to be as powerful as the wolf. The wolf is running around, dreaming of flying, making fake wings and fails and the birds flying, but having fear of the big raven king who threatens to steal their kind hearts.  The happy ending of the chapter is that the wolf starts caring for the birds and his wings start to grow. Not sure what happens to the raven. I think that’s a different story….

I see my work as three dimensional Drawings in motion. I arrange Individual ceramic components, crochet and wall paintings in different ways to form large installations that adapt to different spaces. I love the flexibility of working with individual ceramic components that can be arranged in different ways. The individual pieces, 5” to 30” in size, are fired and glazed stoneware and porcelain. I am adding yarn using Crochet, Tatting (called  "Little Ship Lace") and now learning also how to make bobbin lace.

I create narratives based on issues I face in my life and as a Buddhist I think often about perception of reality, how we create reality, how we can basically make a better world by changing the mind. I am fond of questioning rather than responding, leaving spaces for stillness and freedom for the viewers. My body of work does not develop from project to project, it is one big story that keeps changing and transforming itself. To an observer, it is more of a conversation that I  continue having with myself by visual means. Artistic practice presented as a gestational thought process, you do not know where it starts and where it ends, it is fluid and dynamic.

My narratives develop on multiple planes and in multiple temporal frameworks. It is not a fairy tale, but rather artistic representation of ideas and feelings. All these narratives, all these stories, all these feelings and I am  just weaves figures and stories out of it. There are no solutions, it’s about what is happening with our lives, our feelings.

I am not a research-driven artist as what you see on the walls is transmitted (or unearthed?) through sitting still, reflecting upon dharma talks and my work as a resident artist for The Creative Center at The Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at Mount Sinai Hospital. Working with people who have limited capacities affects me bringing an existential degree to my contemplation of humanity, anger, attachment, and suffering. A native of Austria, I studied art therapy, but rather than continuing towards I have developed a self-taught technique of drawing and sculpting, intuitively learning and perfecting what I needed to say through my drawings and objects.  Being informed by understanding of larger and more painful experiences influences one’s ability to look at life. My  life informs my works and vice versa. Even with my patients I try to find the healthy part and work with it. What’s the alternative if we turn away from each other instead of looking into faces. Compassion is an essential part of my work - a value that we see less off in the polarized society of 2024 United States. For me an enemy that is initially perceived on the outside turns out to be an enemy on the inside. The lines get blurred through my stories.  Yet, the hope I show is that my heroes are able to go toward peace rather than a confrontation.