This series of silkscreen prints is based on graffiti from the underground in East Berlin (the former GDR). I found them in a so-called “ghost” station where, between about 1950 and 1989, people could mark on and scratch into the walls without being seen. As with several of my other projects, I began by copying all the inscriptions I could find. These full-sized records became the first step in a more considered artistic process that responds to specific sites and layered meanings. Many of the inscriptions in the concrete walls are unexpectedly humorous—some mention the famous, fictional cowboy Karl May for example – but others contain fascist or violent content. This made the material challenging to work with but it also raised interesting questions about mark making: can political intention – or any subjective meanings at all – be embedded in strokes? What essential, expressive, aspects of inscribed messages remain when the order of the markings is disrupted; when the graffito is taken apart? In these works I explore those questions by separating and reassembling the markings within different images. This results in linear abstractions that only refer to the originals in the sense that the shape of the lines came from the same hands, with the same range of motion.

The series was included in the exhibition psychopomp, at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2017 and is directly related to my doctoral thesis, Intentions Through Hands and Time (2025).