The year before last, during spring-cleaning, I classified my fashion magazine collection of twenty years as waste. It turned into perfect material for a long-planned collage project. Taking a closer look at the pile of magazines (mainly British Vogue 1988–2003) was like taking a trip to my youth. Pleased, frustrated, and even angry, I encountered that central imagery that serves to build and maintain ideal Western femininity.
On one hand, the collages/paper cuts feature a subconscious web of memories and emotions; sometimes gently unclear, sometimes rather uncomfortable and tangled. On the other hand, the works have a more conscious quality: They explore the means of looking at and experimenting with the imagery of advertising as well as its strategies for projecting gender.
The material I have selected for my works mainly consists of advertisements. One of my methods is “intra-image transfer”. A picture becomes like a jigsaw puzzle that has been put together differently; or like the “before” and “after” photos of a makeover, only the photos have been placed one upon the other.
