I recently listened to you introduce your practice to Angela Bulloch via BPA Talks. Within the first minute you said you’ve always written as well as made work. Are you able to tell me what writing means to you and how you experience it in your practice?

Writing came naturally to me, probably because both of my parents are writers. It has taken different forms throughout my life. I kept a traditional diary as a child and a teenager, and in college I recorded my sexual encounters and dating life in Word documents (like many a woman in her twenties). This diary turned from a “little black book” into a record of various conversations and studio visits and occurrences, and soon enough I had a running narrative alongside me as I lived my life. However, the words didn’t always correspond with real events; they came with breaks and pauses and in a certain order, which I also preserved by writing them down. Even if I wrote a diary purely for myself, I almost always wrote it as if someone would eventually read it. I also keep endless documents of things I am thinking about, phrases, references, etc. I tend to pull my works’ titles from these sources. I also wrote art reviews in the early 2010s and sometimes published art theory. There were a lot of artist-authored theory journals at the time. I stopped writing about art mostly, but I still do it from time to time if someone asks. I recently published some texts as part of a series of “artist writings,” a label I was happy to apply to avoid any specific genre.

I stopped trying to keep a diary when I read Hemlock Forest by Moyra Davey. When Davey asked her son if he kept a diary, and he answered: “I’d rather live my life than narrate it,” I couldn’t stop thinking about the vanity of diary writing.

I don’t see why things can’t coexist—both narrating your life and living it. It’s just another way to exist. Not wrong necessarily. Maybe it’s wrong when you start to see yourself as a character in a novel, and then the problem might become that you take agency away from yourself and see yourself as part of some grander narrative out of your control, which can be dangerous. Maybe her son got tired of being in her videos.

She does often express a kind of guilt about “transgressing,” about using other people, but always seems to end up taking the risk. Is risk a part of your practice?

I have also “used” other people, but more in the sense of collaborations or as inspiration. Sometimes they are aware of it and other times they aren’t. I sometimes make risky decisions with regard to display. I might prioritize the image or the process over the archival quality, things like that. These are broader, and intentional risks, which bring the process of making the painting to the fore of the practice.

I think of your former professor Monika Baer as someone who foregrounds process and affective potential. The curator and writer Milan Ther once described her paintings in Die Einholung as embodiments of her agency. I wonder if you’d talk about your motivations behind bringing the process of making the painting to the fore of your practice.

I would say that all paintings are embodiments of the maker’s agency. I don’t have motivations per se for bringing the process to the fore, it’s more the natural way my art making has evolved. Rather than force subject matter, or have predispositions for the end result, the process has naturally come to the surface. There are still ideas in mind, forsure, but the way in which they are made has recently become quite evident. For example, a collaged surface with a certain type of glue—the movements involved with how it was applied become visible.

I remember you said in the talk with Angela Bulloch that painting isn’t enough by itself. Do you still feel this way? Does painting have to be tied to writing to be truly satisfying?

No, not at all. Since then I changed my mind and I believe painting in itself is enough. I think when I had those ideas I was a bit defensive about being a painter, but now I gave that up.

Why do you think you were a bit defensive about being a painter?

Early on I had a lot of ideas in my head that I struggled to convey with the medium of painting alone, which I was intuitively drawn to and enjoyed the most out of other media. When I was younger and in undergrad, painting had a reputation as a “less serious” medium (at my school at least) than sculpture, video, installation, etc. I could also have been projecting, but I was also disappointed by painting class conversations which seemed to revolve around the formal rather than the conceptual. Eventually I gave up worrying about it and decided that painting can be part of a larger practice and basically that you can do it however you want—there are no rules. I also discovered some artists who conveyed ideas and concepts with painting in ways I was interested in. Since I am a painter in addition to a writer and editor, I guess I felt “painter” was a rather limited title as well, versus “artist.” I make visual art primarily—I don’t know yet if I consider the writing “art”—so I would have to agree with Angela that my practice is image-making.

Often you piece together many different kinds of marks and fragments from many different sources. Bücherzelle (Sans soleil) (2021), springs to mind.

Some of my most recent works involve collage, but this is by no means a universal label over my entire practice. I think of my recent works in more of the tradition of assemblage in the art historical sense versus “collage.” The sources may seem different, but they are all personally connected to my lexicon. I gather a lot of images from my personal archive and my surroundings. Like the Athens work, the image from Bücherzelle comes from the street near where I lived in Charlottenburg, Berlin. I guess, these images are physically collected (ephemera) and also photographs, which I take somewhat obsessively (I currently have more than 75,000 photos stored on my 1 TB iPhone).

In some circumstances more than others the idea that you’ve “built” a piece of work really resonates with me.

Can you explain more what you mean by “built”? Maybe what you mean is more that the paintings are like objects. I think of them less as window paintings and more indexically. I do strive for layers and “depth.” But I do hope that they come together to form an overall impression, an impact on the viewer. I don’t have overly imposing ideas for my viewers, but I do hope in some ways that they can relate to my work, and also hopefully find it beautiful. I do think beauty is important.

I’m thinking about the glue you mentioned earlier. How there is evidence of your process on show. In this sense, some works showcase their own coming of being. We can see signs of their construction.

I like that, yes. It sounds right.

Shop by Concern (2023), for instance, even appears gift wrapped.

I love the idea of that painting being gift wrapped. I hadn’t heard it described that way before. In a way the physical handling, and management, of paintings as objects is also part of it. Just before that painting was going to be picked up to go to Paris, I put the bow around it. So it did in a way, send it off as gift wrapped. I got the bow from legendary ribbon-seller Mokuba in Paris on a previous trip.

But that of course doesn’t always function as an emblem of your practice. With Tall Poppy Syndrome [1] (2021), Morning Routine (2021), Lucky Seven (2018), as well as Shop by Concern (2023), there seems to be something else happening: a binary of sorts. These paintings are divided along a central axis separating, what, analogue and digital means of mark marking? It is either loose and gestural or more controlled and neat.

The binary to me is referencing pages, like two facing pages in a document, one which is illustrated, or two facing pages of text.

From what I’ve seen, your work can be decisively local. I’m thinking about these paintings from your solo exhibition If You Don’t Speak Greek at Ύλη[matter]HYLE, Athens back in 2018 when I say that. Could you tell me how you came to make these paintings which reflect your surroundings?

I came to Athens in 2018 at the invitation of my friend Georgia who had been a visiting artist in Frankfurt. She invited me to do a show at her space Hyle. I wasn’t sure how to approach making the show as I was rather overwhelmed by the city of Athens itself. Firstly, as her assistant, I was sent into the city to retrieve materials, which gave me a very intimate view into the city from a local, where I had to try to understand Greek in order to buy simple things like tape or papier maché. In the end, bereft of suitable “subject matter” I ended up copying the streets around me, taking photos with my phone and then re-interpreting them as paintings.

You want to make paintings that can be read on their own terms. As a viewer, a deep satisfaction of your work, besides the beauty, the visual interest, is found in parsing its references. I think this is why I’m so intrigued with your archive. How it radiates through your projects. With your interest in archive, it makes so much sense that you affiliate your practice with assemblage. What does it mean to use the archive, and to activate it?

The archive is an old half of an IKEA box I have been using for four years, but the archive predates the box itself. I have always been a bit of a magpie when it comes to printed ephemera. What draws my eye is varied, but I do have a special taste for the kind of neoliberal middle- or “luxury”-aesthetic, the graphics favored by direct to consumer brand marketers; or by staid old European luxury brands (think Hanro)—there I also play with the cultural implications of the brand, like I did with the“gift-wrapped” Loewe work. The treatment is slightly ironic. But it’s also newspapers, fabrics, printed images, pill boxes, bits of table cloth, plastic bags, many things… I turn this box over on the floor when starting a work and go through everything again.

Let’s end by talking about your upcoming solo exhibition at Sweetwater, Berlin. Are you able to tell me what you have planned?

I’m working on larger paintings with a collage method right now, adding screen prints to them, but also making small prints on aluminum of handcrafted (in Blender) 3D bottles from my boudoir. I think of 3D modeling as maybe a way to “deep photograph,” capture, and own products by making them yourself. My friend told me a story about her mother, who had all of her jewelry stolen in a robbery, and she spent months painstakingly recreating them in gouaches. You can re-make real objects with art, or commemorate them. I’m trying to do the same in a way, I have strong attachments to objects. I’m also depicting things like small desserts, little moments of heaven to distract one from the global hells we seem to experience daily, the stresses on budgets, the housing crisis in Berlin, why not have a tartelette?