2024/25
Inkjet-Print, Beeswax, Resin on wood
ca. 120 x 45 cm
The longing for the untouched in nature meets the human urge to domesticate the wild. The sword-shaped surfaces bear photographs of the touch of an animal skin through artificially extended fingernails on their blades sealed with beeswax and resin. A staged act of taming the original. The form intervenes in the content, limits it, and thus allows it to become a symbol itself: of nature and artificiality, power and tenderness, control and wilderness. The photographs are based on AI-generated image prompts. They don’t depict real encounters, but visual imaginings of what touching an animal might look like. What appears empathetic is already a translation, a technologically shaped simulation. In the studio, I reconstruct these moments through elaborate setups. The animal becomes a site of projection, a mirror of human desire oscillating between intimacy and domination. The sword shapes are not historical replicas but laser-cut MDF silhouettes, sealed with encaustic and edged in blaze orange, a textile tape used in hunting, highly visible to humans, but barely perceptible to animals. Camouflage and signal, visibility and invisibility, do not stand in opposition; instead, they collapse into one another. The sword here is neither static metaphor nor purely symbolic object. It is tool, interface, point of contact. It doesn’t just frame the image, it cuts through it, redirects perception, and disrupts the surface. In this disruption, the medium itself asks: Who is touching whom? At the core of this work lies an inquiry into the intersections of archaic ritual and contemporary technology. The sword doesn’t glorify violence; it questions cultural narratives of power. Inspired by alternative storytelling models like Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, I ask: What kinds of tools shape our worldviews? Which stories of violence persist, and what other narratives might emerge? Working with ambiguous gestures and symbolic materials, I seek to open a space for reflecting on how ‘wildness’ is imagined—and what it means to try to reach for it.