Research as Part of the Practice
How academic research is changing the way I think about memory, identity and the individual within larger systems.
My current academic research has gradually become part of the way I think as an artist.
Working with historical material has made me increasingly aware of the distance between history as it is recorded and history as it is lived. Large events are often preserved through dates, decisions, statistics and collective narratives. Yet behind these structures are individual lives — private memories, emotions, adaptations and choices that rarely fit neatly into an official account.
This distinction has become important to my artistic practice.
I find myself less interested in history as a sequence of events and more interested in what larger systems leave within a person. How does an external reality become internal? What do we absorb from the structures around us without consciously choosing it? And how much of what we eventually understand as ourselves has been shaped by circumstances, expectations and inherited ways of seeing the world?
These questions have created an unexpected connection between my research and my studio practice.
In the studio, I approach identity not as something isolated or fixed, but as something formed through continuous contact with the world around us. Social structures, collective memory, inherited values and personal experience overlap. Some become inseparable from us; others eventually begin to feel foreign.
Research has also changed the way I think about material.
I have become increasingly drawn to the idea that material can hold traces of pressure, resistance and transformation without illustrating them literally. A surface can yield or resist. A structure can contain, interrupt or alter another. Meaning can emerge through these physical relationships rather than through representation alone.
For me, academic research and artistic practice remain different forms of inquiry. I do not want one to illustrate the other.
But they increasingly meet at the same point: the individual within larger structures, and the question of what remains distinctly our own after those structures have passed through us.
My current academic research has gradually become part of the way I think as an artist.
Working with historical material has made me increasingly aware of the distance between history as it is recorded and history as it is lived. Large events are often preserved through dates, decisions, statistics and collective narratives. Yet behind these structures are individual lives — private memories, emotions, adaptations and choices that rarely fit neatly into an official account.
This distinction has become important to my artistic practice.
I find myself less interested in history as a sequence of events and more interested in what larger systems leave within a person. How does an external reality become internal? What do we absorb from the structures around us without consciously choosing it? And how much of what we eventually understand as ourselves has been shaped by circumstances, expectations and inherited ways of seeing the world?
These questions have created an unexpected connection between my research and my studio practice.
In the studio, I approach identity not as something isolated or fixed, but as something formed through continuous contact with the world around us. Social structures, collective memory, inherited values and personal experience overlap. Some become inseparable from us; others eventually begin to feel foreign.
Research has also changed the way I think about material.
I have become increasingly drawn to the idea that material can hold traces of pressure, resistance and transformation without illustrating them literally. A surface can yield or resist. A structure can contain, interrupt or alter another. Meaning can emerge through these physical relationships rather than through representation alone.
For me, academic research and artistic practice remain different forms of inquiry. I do not want one to illustrate the other.
But they increasingly meet at the same point: the individual within larger structures, and the question of what remains distinctly our own after those structures have passed through us.
22.10.2026
