Art is experience

One of the most important sources of inspiration for my artistic work is the world of inner experience.

The journey began many years ago with my psychology studies and a semester focusing on “Psychology, Cosmology and Consciousness” in San Francisco.

After that I devoted myself to “field research”: personal experience and lived experience were and are, for me, the direct path into the adventure of discovering myself and the world.

Experiencing oneself is a constant process of development

For many years now I have been passionately exploring other spaces of consciousness as a “psychonaut”. These experiences accompany my artistic work and weave themselves into my works. In other words: this constant process of development provides the background against which my works take shape. But only a fraction finds its way into matter, for much remains a mystery and can hardly be conveyed, let alone depicted.

That may sound exotic and unusual. But such experiences – whether through meditation, dreams or trance states – served in ancient and earlier cultures as an indispensable spiritual matrix on which life took place. In our modern culture, by contrast, logical thinking is very dominant; other areas of experience are rather marginal, simply not “normal”.

Inner tension transforms into outer forms

My personal access to this world came first through a fascination with the human body. An early medium was dance, at first as a competitive sport and later as free expressive dance. Expressing states of inner tension and release directly in dance was a first impulse to engage with the theme of “embodiment”. At the same time I began to translate my feelings into figurative sculptures with a particular posture. This form of expression was a fascinating process that always absorbed me for many hours. “Aufbruch” (departure), a multifaceted leitmotif of my figures, represents this search, the journey inwards, through the body to one's own soul and to a condensing outer expression in creative work.

The desire to cross boundaries led me to further deeply formative experiences. I was very interested in at least pushing open the door to the unconscious and, at best, having mystical experiences.

I found many paths or vehicles for this. I learned Holotropic Breathwork, a technique developed by Stanislav Grof that leads into expanded states of consciousness. Later I had consciousness-expanding experiences in the rituals of other cultures. On several journeys to South America I took part in ceremonies, for example with a “curandero” of the Asháninka people from the Peruvian rainforest.

Art opens up new worlds of experience

But whichever path I chose, the experiences were similar: beneath the surface of “normality”, of language, culture and patterns of thought, I came into contact with a level capable of breaking open the boundaries of the personal, of one's own identity. The perspective of the ego became an artificial distortion of actual being. A friend from San Francisco once put it like this: “Perhaps we are not we at all …”. At the very least we are much more than what we think we are.

I associate these “transpersonal” experiences with a high potential for transformative power and thus for artistic vitality. In art we can experience with all our senses a world that touches, captivates and carries us away with deep knowledge, beauty and the poetry of its non-verbal nature. Artists and viewers alike. Surrounding oneself with art means taking part in expanded worlds of experience.

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