on stone
[practice]
ES + DE | 2006 - 2019

My first encounter with stone was in university, during my first year of fine arts.
There, I learned the basics - how to work with different types of stone, how to handle tools. But it wasn’t until years later, in Berlin, that I truly fell into its rhythm.

For a while, I frequented the BBK Werkstätten in Wedding, where Herr Noak, became an unexpected mentor. Over coffee and conversation, he shared tips that sharpened my technique. In that space, carving became a kind of meditation - the strike of the mallet, the swing of the arm, the rhythmic clink of steel against rock lulling me into a trance.

I learned to listen to the material, to shift between chisels, mallets, gradines, and toothed hammers as the excess stone demanded. It’s a practice of subtraction: first hacking away large chunks, then paring down to finer and finer fragments, until what remains is no longer what was taken, but what was meant to be.