I grew up in London, a child of a German refuge who escaped the Nazi Regime. The Holocaust survivors that entered England formed my community and I am a product of that environment with its haunting history. It has left an indelible mark on who I am and how I see the world.
My work explores two aspects of opposing polarities, place and non place; perhaps because I am never at home nor away from it. While immigrating to America, my past and my present caught up with me. I became preoccupied with the building and moving process, and the uncanny characteristics within the unstable nature of house and home. How do we build and relocate our lives while striving to recreate the means and markers of settlement? What often prevails in the work is a sense of dislocation.
I examine our environment and interpret elements of its ordered landscape. I am drawn to the civic architecture that navigates us through our daily lives- the structures we see but rarely notice. They are on the side of the road or in between places; Storage units, gas stations, broken railings, washed out signs. Discarded. Abandoned. Invisible.
At first glance the work is reassuring in its representation, but soon falls into a sense of uncertainty and doubt as the pieces are deprived of their expected function or context. They become mock readymades, oscillating between the specific and the generic. That point of departure intrigues me - when we move from name to number.
The work is my reaction to those very things that should offer a sense of security, yet do the opposite, and set into motion the varied complexities best described by the word ‘unheimlich’ , which literally means NOT homely.