ABOUT THE PROJECT

Living in Lucerne, Switzerland, in the foothills of the Alps, I grew up with mountaineering. Several times a week I stroll through the mountains with friends, sometimes by myself. On long hikes by myself, I started to think about the surrounding environment and found something beautiful I have never had recognized before in this way: Stones. When you are in the mountains, you typically think about stones in the mean of their quality as well as their sheer beauteousness in its entirety. I started to have a closer look on different layers, on their texture and colors, their origin and thinking about what their existence means to me. On what precisely, I am mountaineering here? It’s something that keeps me grounded. In the same time, stones are obstacles. Some of them you can master, others not. Stones and their bizarre formations are welcoming on the one side and repugnant on the other side. With their colors and shapes, often formed by their exposure to all sorts of weather, do they dominate our landscapes and further how we feel and life. Almost all of them are older than all creatures on earth, so I thought that they must have to tell us something. I started to break them up and found interesting colors and textures in it, often more raw than apparent from the outside. On a spiritual level, I started to feel that they carry around a long story with one in their core and come with different energies. So, I decided to grind them down by handwork to 100 microns to get pigments I can paint with. First, I just wanted to show their different colors. In the meanwhile, I use different technics to generate structures that are, from my point of view, consistent with their wattage. And I can tell you: Stones are full of live.