Painting
French Breakfast, 2021 (watercolour)
French Breakfast is a A5 postcard made for the How do you Fika? postcard exhibition at Fika Café. Once again I'm placing death in mundane scenes.
Богородица Тројеручица, 2021 (digital)
This digital painting was made in response to the Zoom lecture "Iconographical Mayhem: Monstrous Saints, Folklore and Mysticism in Orthodox Icons, Old and New"
I got interested in the fact that serbian-orthodox iconography contains such monsterous images, even though my religious grandmother always critiqued the art I produced as being too shocking. This prompted me to transform the three handed mother mary into an arguably more shocking icon.
Bacon'n'Egg, 2021 (watercolour on paper)
As progression of the last painting I imagined the same death character doing normal daily things like having breakfast outside in spring time. Normalizing death as something that is part of our life.
Smile, 2021 (acrylic on canvas)
I painted this after reading Simone de Beauvoir’s book “A Very Easy Death” in which she described her mothers smile while on her death bed just days before her passing.
The colourful light swirl is inspired by someone’s recollection of their near death experience from an interview in the Netflix show “Surviving Death”.
Memento Mori, 2020 (ink & acrylic on canvas)
The ribcage as a symbol of memento mori. It is protecting all of our vital organs, yet it can’t protect from the inevitable death.
Vergissmeinnicht, 2020 (watercolour on heavy watercolour paper)
Have you ever wondered why the woods are both a magical and scary place depending on the time of day? I have looked further into the nature of how we perceive a forest. By day It might be associated with fairies, deer and green fluffy moss. At night we think of murderers hiding behind trees, darkness and wild predators.
My research has led me to the Japanese folklore “Obasute”, which is an old practice of carrying elderly relatives to remote places like mountains or forests and leaving them there to die. Seeing both cruelty and kindness in this act, depending on the perspective, fascinated me.
I then had a closer look at the idea of natural burials, which take the environment and nature into account. No harmful embalming fluids are being used and there is little to no damage to the ecosystem of the burial ground. After visiting a natural burial ground near Dundee and experiencing its calm and peaceful atmosphere, I started a watercolour painting. I aim to capture the duality within the atmosphere of a forest and emphasise the elemental nature of a decomposed body among trees and bushes.
Saudade, 2019 (acrylic on canvas board)
When I first looked through the Archive collections, I was immediately drawn towards the old photographs of the Scottish mountaineering group The Grampian Club. They instantly reminded me of the Alps. After going home to Austria over the holidays, I visited the mountains in the way I usually like to do: I went snowboarding.
The Grampian Club photographs led me to actively appreciate the mountainside, taking pictures and trying to capture textures and shapes that are otherwise easily overseen. I looked at both the photographs I took and the ones from the archive to find visual opposites and likenesses, subsequently exploring these textures in my paintings.
