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Collages

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We live in an age of image flood, which breaks over us through all media and newspapers. In my work I deal with the construct of reality that our mind creates and its perceptions. The rea- lities we perceive are not direct images of an objective outside world. Questions arise: Whe- re do objects we have seen, impressions, and memories locate themselves in our memory? How can our thoughts and associations take on spatial structures? My mind map collages are meant to make these visible. I began by collecting photographs and images in newspapers because, in contrast to glossy newsprint, the aesthetics of the colors of the photographs on this rough, rather matte and open newsprint appealed to me. 

I then blacked out everything on the collected photos to isolate only those elements of the image that were salient to me and that had motivated me to include just that photo in my collection. The blackened pictures were thus present on the one hand as a whole, visible howe- ver were only small elements, picture cutouts, patterns and structures. When I looked at this seemingly unsorted collection, I asked myself again: How does memory work? Where are the images of my collection stored in the memory of my brain? And how does the access to these images work? Has an inner spatial structure also arisen from these innumerable photos of my collection? And what does this look like when I think of only a particular part of the pic- ture? Do I then necessarily also think of an other specific part? Which piece leads to another piece and how does my brain put the whole thing together to form a completely new image? 

In order to examine this more closely, I have started to reassemble the structures in my head, these pipe dreams, analogously, to link them and to form them into a new picture. This new formation can be imagined as a large puzzle - only with the decisive difference that there are no templates for the many puzzle pieces. Instead, the new image is created through the con- stant change of perspective, the comparison between the selected picture elements on the work table and the memory images in the mind. This process can be compared to dreams. In our dreams, our lived experiences are sometimes assembled into absurd and hardly comprehensible images or films, and when we wake up, we often ask ourselves: Who was directing this? My working process works in a very similar way. 

First, I look for image elements from my collection that can be easily linked. These can be technical parts or architectural elements. It could be organic structures such as branches, twigs, trees, vegetation or plantings, but also abstract forms and colors. These elements, the abundance of what I have seen, experienced and collected, steer the associative shaping or guide it in very specific directions when finding the picture. Sighted, found, extracted, ac- quired knowledge and emotional, all this accumulates in me, to then visualize itself in a new form. It is important to me that the autonomy of the cut out image under the colored layer - be it black or another color - still remains. The isolated pictorial elements thus form themselves into a new pictorial statement. The underlying pictorial context, however, remains intact and is marked by the visible cut edges of the individual images, which cover my collages like a fine grid. 

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