What inspires me
Lange Erlen, Basel, Switzerland
The creative stream in an artist's life can be interrupted by sudden lifestyle changes, crises, relocation, or illness. After a hiatus of 10 years, my creativity as an artist was re-ignited by the Covid -19 lockdowns which began in March 2020. I found my creativity again in the solace and serenity of the forest and streams in and around Lange Erlen in Basel where I live.
Voynich Manuscript.
During the time of Covid, a friend sent me a link to the Voynich Manuscript. I was fascinated by this fifteenth-century codex, full of illustrations relating to plants, magic, astrology, medical and scientific text, the meaning of which still eludes researchers. Inspired by the Voynich Manuscript, I sketched the plants and trees in Lange Erlen. My drawings were neither realistic nor abstract and I called them: “Mystical Plants” because I felt they emerged from me, in a mystical way.
Libby Heaney
I met Libby Heaney in Basel when she had her “Quantum Soup” exhibition at HEK in Basel. (Haus der Elektronischen Künste.) Libby Heaney holds a PhD in quantum information science and worked for several years as a quantum physicist before turning to art. She fulfilled her childhood dream and studied art at Central St. Martins in London and is the only artist in the world using quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium.
She has been entangling quantum computing with digital art through her self-written quantum code, game engine technology, and video and image making. In exhibitions, her quantum art combines with physical elements such as slimy glass sculptures, watercolour paintings, and fabric tentacles which create sensuous worlds that not only speak to the entanglement of the virtual and physical but also of the past, present, and future, as well as body and mind and the human and the machine.
Hilma af Klint was born on 26 October (we share a birthday) in 1862 – 1944.
She was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings I admire and which I saw in the Tate Gallery in London. A considerable body of her work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian. She belonged to a group called "The Five", comprising a circle of women inspired by Theosophy. Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas. Yet her work remained outside the spotlight for decades, until, in 2013, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm mounted a travelling retrospective that became a surprise hit. Six years later, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, exhibited her work which received 600,000 visitors, making it the most widely-seen exhibition the museum had ever done at that time.
Swiss Artist, Emma Kunz
I have often visited the Emma Kunz Museum at Würenlos, in Switzerland and the grotto which has become famous for the healing AIONA earth powder which she discovered in 1941.
In her lifetime she was recognized as a healer although she described herself as a researcher. She recorded her knowledge in large-format drawings on graph paper, and their significance extends far beyond their aesthetic beauty. They are a visible testimony of her research, represented by strictly geometric drawings on graph paper with pencil, coloured pencil and oil pastels, whose content, among other things provides answers to her questions about life and its spiritual implications. She described her artistic energy fields as follows: "Design and shape as dimension, rhythm, symbol and transformation of numbers and concepts." Each colour and each shape had a precise meaning in her understanding of the world.
As a visionary artist, she bequeathed more than 600 works which is a remarkable collection of her works of art that encodes immeasurable knowledge. Her gift was an awareness of connections that contradicted both normal experience and scientific interpretations of the laws of Nature and art. Her drawings are attempts to find a universal connection.