About Me

 I am a collage artist. In short, I cut out people from their original story books and place them into unfamiliar situations, offering them different challenges and new opportunities. I make assemblage sculptures in a similar way, using old toys and other vintage materials to portray traditional characters with new or updated narratives.

As I see it, my collage and assemblage works are visual stories about social and cultural identities, roles, and relationships, often with references to German folktales and other Western traditions of storytelling and playing. These references are as much related to my German origin and my own biography as much as they are to my academic and professional background as a sociologist and writer.

Above all, working with materials like old storybooks, puppets, and game tokens is a very personal matter to me, as they take me emotionally back to the first eight years of my childhood which I spent together with my sister in my grandmother’s home. I remember these years as being the most perfect of my young life, despite the fact that my mother did not live with us and my father was not present at all. It was a defining experience because my grandmother created a “home” for me. It was a physical place where I felt loved and cared for, but more importantly, it was a state of mind that anchored me. I have taken this feeling of being “home” to all the places I moved to later on.

I was born and grew up in Northern Germany. I spent my college years and most of my adult life in and around Hamburg. I started my professional life, perhaps surprisingly, as a banking apprentice. This experience seems strange and unlikely for me now, but I was always curious about everything and appreciated gaining valuable insights into the world of business people, office cultures, bureaucracy, and work hierarchies while I was working in the bank. After five years of working as a loan officer, I studied sociology, psychology and German literature at the University of Kiel in Germany. I completed my graduate studies and thesis research as an exchange student at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee, where I had the wonderful opportunity to also take sculpture classes. After graduating, I worked as a writer and editor for various university publications as well as for a technical magazine.

I moved to the States in 2001, following my husband to Chicago where he had accepted a three-year research position. We had intended to move back to Germany after those three years – but then we didn't. We loved the life we had made here for ourselves, we enjoyed our new friends, our first house, being in an exciting city, and we loved going on spontaneous road trips to get to know the other amazing and beautiful places in this country.

Moving here also meant new opportunities for me as an emerging artist. I crafted collections of playful items, from a complete hand-puppet set to a series of small ornaments and toys, all rooted in German storytelling traditions. I participated in numerous juried art events in and around Chicago and enjoyed some nice successes. In 2007, we relocated to Ruston, Louisiana for professional reasons, and we started a family. Storytelling, both fiction and non-fiction, is something I have enjoyed and practiced throughout my personal and professional life, both as listener and teller.

Storytelling is one way that people and communities connect with each other and share their concepts and values. However, folktales and traditional children’s literature seem to have a particularly important function, as they introduce ideas about which behaviors and expectations are socially acceptable and which are not. Having my children grow up here in the United States also meant getting into American children’s literature, which opened up an additional rich world of stories for me as I got familiar with Mother Goose, classic bedtime stories, and popular book characters as well as their underlying meanings and connotations.

In my work, I like to refer to traditional children’s stories and folktales for sentimental reasons and from a sociological point of view. In addition, the lighthearted and humorous note that such references bring serves an important function: It helps the viewer connect to my images easily, even if the contents are heavy and serious. While my work often deals with individual dilemmas, interpersonal conflicts, culture clashes, political movements, environmental problems, and societal dysfunctions, my images appear, nonetheless, innocently light and carefree because of their playful references to old familiar stories. Happy endings always seem to be on the horizon of my compositions, offering unbroken trust in the future, or at least glimmers of hope.

My work has been shown statewide in international juried competitions such as “Surreal Salon” at Baton Rouge Gallery and in solo exhibitions including two shows at the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe. It has been featured in numerous magazines and is collected in the US and Europe.

Studio Visit 2020

Follow me into my studio to see where I teach and work! The main part of this video is about the concept and process of my 24-piece “Earth” series as I am showing the creative process of #14.