Art is a constant engagement with whom or what I see, listen to, read, experience, etc. My process begins when I pause during a mundane task and ask: "Wait a minute - why am I doing this? What does it mean?"

My visual production includes walking, driving, seeing into my process as much as I also crochet, sew, cut, draw, photograph, photocopy, and use computer graphics and ‘photoshop’ manipulations. These different techniques and materials act as metaphors to create meaning. I twist culturally accepted systems, habits and patterns and examine theories like cultural, feminist, architectural studies and urban planning. The conscious act of looking, listening, experiencing steadily transforms my perception of how people, events, ideas or systems relate to each other.

A decade ago I moved from Hamburg, Germany to San Francisco. Here I began to examine Germany’s recent history more closely. It was a subjective examination of what home, language and work meant to me. I was curious how my moving away from home changed my relationship to Germany. My installations described a feeling of neither being in Germany nor here in the States but somewhere between places, homes and languages. I obsessively explored issues surrounding the interior and the manifold meanings of homemaking and developed an idiosyncratic visual language using materials as metaphors: clothes, furniture, photographs, slides, hair, tools, books, fabric, etc.

I spent the last two years in Irvine, Southern California, where I completed my MFA work. I began to compare Irvine with familiar places like Hamburg, Berlin and San Francisco. These site investigations began intuitively and embodied tasks such as taking snapshots while driving, sketching my own maps or photocopying and enlarging fragments of existing maps. I was annoyed by traffic, sprawl, segregation, pollution and suburban distance. At the same time , I was struck by so much sky or by the horizon line drawing the flat cityscape of Los Angeles or the diversity of people always on the move in this net of highways and streets. My driving became like movie making, the windshield being the camera lens and the projection screen. As a way to record the manifold experiences, I developed different mailing systems through which I sent out postcards made from site snapshots. First I sent them to Germany - as general deliveries without being able to pick some of them up. Then others were sent to where I was living and working. The cards carried quotes about urban planning, philosophy and cultural mappings, texts relating to my fascination with the horizon or described my feelings while making sense of Southern California.

Also during this time I visited Berlin several times. Each time I was drawn to the Potsdamer Platz, an area of massive urban re-construction. I became both fascinated and horrified with Berlin’s extensive construction sites. I found similarities between a planned and controlled post suburban city like Irvine and the capitalist restructuring of parts of Berlin. ‘Whereas’ is one of the projects completed in Irvine. Via ‘photoshop’ I erased the ground of three different cityscapes: Berlin, Irvine, San Francisco. Each image depicts a blank, white field. They were then printed as large color photographs. The horizon line became the descriptive rendering for each place. I used the postcards of my site seeing for this installation. The snapshot aesthetic and the quantity of words and images became conceptually the substance for the missing ground.

Back in the Bay Area, my interest what city, urban planning, gentrification and locality means, continues. I am walking and driving throughout the Bay Area, and document places that changed or that I feel transformed in the last two years. I detect such rapid shifts in city layouts and atmosphere, especially in San Francisco and Oakland. A recent project deals with the return to the Bay Area. In Trip, I developed a series of slides which deal with driving, speeding through different landscapes and staring out of the window while traveling through layers of real and mental spaces, different times and thoughts.

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