Ai no hana - Eine Blüte wie das Meer, 2024 (a flower like the ocean, 2024)
18,5 x 11cm
Indigo-‘flower‘ pigment (Hana no Ai) and limestone pigment (sekkai) from Okinawa on wood
INDIGO
The dye, as well as the pigment indigo, are part of global human history and led me to various new nodes within my work. During my time in Okinawa (Japan), I focused my research on the dye indigo, among other things. The word for indigo in Japanese is Ai, it has the same pronunciation as the sign for love.
In Okinawa, the production of indigo is a type of mud production due to the subtropical climate and its result is a blue-greenish brew. On its surface the ‚indigo flower‘ - the Ai(no)Hana, floats.
When I visited a local indigo farm in the north on the main island of Okinawa, the owner gave me some of these dried indigo flowers. Although they were almost as light as air, they weighed as heavy as gold in my hands.
To transfer the idea of the connectivity between the human body and its surroundings into my physical work process, I started to use my own environment as a tool for painting and drawing.
By using collected materials, breaking them up, processing them and thus
producing my own pigments, my color space is created. By selecting and
producing my own pigments, stories of places and interactions with my
immediate surrounding emerge.
The method of incorporating the world in which I live into the medium with
which I express myself gives me the opportunity to weave very specific conditions together.
Color and material become more than just a medium, they become a storage of moments and interactions of certain places and people.
MA-22
For example in the work Keimblatt (2022) the last layer is painted with the
self-collected and handmade earth pigment from the Italian mountain Monte Amiata in Tuscany. The region where I was born. When I found out that there was an orange-gold earth pigment from this mountain, which I have known all my life, I immediately wanted to paint with it. However, my local pigment shop told me that the pigment itself could no longer be sold because the earth layer had already been eroded too much for this certain orange-gold pigment color. To process this fact, I collected earth from Monte Amiata and created my first own pigment: MA-22.
Through this process, I was able to incorporate the connections of how much humans affect the environment into my work
SHELL-22/-23
An example for this is the work cycle soft purple almost shell (2022- 2024). A self-made, hand-produced mussel pigment in different grain levels was used.
At first, I used mussels from the coast near Knokke-Heist (SHELL-22). Further in the pocess I continued with mussels from a mussel dish (SHELL-23), which were hand-cleaned and disinfected. During this process, each individual mussel was cleaned several times, revealing its unique coloring and grain.
Each shell had a story and the delicate purple pigment color varied depending on where it came from.
The mussel pigment SHELL-22, which was cleaned by the ocean, was much more purple. The meal mussel pigment SHELL-23, on the other hand, was much grayer. For me, this very long and intensive process increases the value of every gram of my self-produced pigments
soft purple almost shell 03, 2022 80x65cm
soft purple almost shell 02, 2022 70x45cm
soft purple almost shell 04, 2022 60x45cm
soft purple almost shell 01, 2022 50x40cm