Beauty Pageant Collage

A true New Yorker with all the good, the bad, and the inbetween for almost 20years. Thus born and bred in Germany, where Recycling is ingrained in your veins from birth, I take great joy and pride in using and re-using materials that have led a life before they fell into my hands. I enjoy skimming antique stores for frames, flea markets for vintage photographs, art books, dictionaries, and often select tear sheets from current magazines bound to be thrown into the trash. I love to be part of that cycle, by enhancing each item’s life expectancy – and as a side effect, help the environment just a little bit. In the stream of life we connect and disconnect as humans with each other, often coincidental, by chance - and my harmoniously pairing this vintage map with that bold gold fish on a two-dimensional surface resembles this process of building unexpected relations - In short, my collages imitate life. To me, working on a collage is a beautiful journey in which i learned to dive deep into my emotions and can get lost in love and life. I am thriving to assemble these positive emotions on paper and hope that the beholder of my art works feels a little – or a lot – of this life embracing happiness, discovers the uniqueness of each piece, sees the stories that the collages have and want to tell. You will also find that I am using a lot of elements from our world’s flora and fauna. The reason being, apart from me being a nature lover per se, that the cycle of life is even more dominant there. The rotten flower serves as fertilizer to the next generation of plants, they go hand in hand, making sure that beauty on our planet stays for eternity. On a last note: Recently, I started working with Epoxy resin to seal my collages rather than using glass to protect them. This leads to an uneven, bumpy surface, with ups and downs, just as life. I want to create a 'touchability', and I urge everyone to not just see, but also feel my work - opening up the senses and inspiring to explore art beyond the mere visual. Even on a somber day you may find solace by exploring my art – At least that is what I am wishing for!