After becoming an architect I felt the desire to go back to my roots, so I started to work with different glassblowers in Germany. I got to know the characteristics and qualities of glass and wanted to free myself from limited approaches towards glass. So I started at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. I do installations, because I can integrate the whole space. As an architect I am still interested in the space surrounding us. And I like people to walk between, through and around my work. I like it, if people touch my work, carefully, and if they might get caught in my world. My work reflects on the question of gender stereotypes, which relates to a biographical background and personal experiences referring to observations I made being a girl, a daughter, a sister, a girl-friend, a mother - and of course being a female part of this society. Wondering, questioning and reflecting is what my work does and it is suggesting answers - more to myself than to anybody else. If I look back on the materials I used, I see that they are easily to manipulate. I see a similarity between the stockings and the glass, only that glass is very hot, when you work with it, and becomes still and stiff when it cooled down. The stockings on one hand carry also the meaning of femininity, which I am very aware of, on the other hand lycra panty hoses have a material, which is very easily manipulated and it can take drastic shapes: being torn, stretched and bent, just like glass, when it is hot.
Ursuppe 2014
On one hand I can give lycra a structure with glass or water hoses, it has to follow it and will be shaped from it. On the other hand the lycra keeps the water hose together, otherwise it would fall apart, like in ‘Slang’ for example. I use ready-made materials in combination with handmade materials, because on one hand they keep their original meaning and character. In the same time I see that they lose their original identity in combination with each other. If I think of ‘Ursuppe’, the panty changes in interaction with the blown glass. The viewer becomes confused about the materiality and the inside/outside relation of the piece. The materials work like a symbiosis together, without losing themselves.
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