I moved to the Bay Area more than two decades ago from Hamburg, Germany where I grew up in a home that strongly inspired creativity. Although my parents are not artists themselves, they have always encouraged creativity and a DIY attitude toward life. We had always good quality art supplies around and went to art exhibits and music shows. Hence I have been a maker and fixer from the start. Early on I learned not just how to sew, knit, crochet, bake and how to make jams or find edible mushrooms but also how to fix a bike, to repair and glue anything in sight and how to do woodworking. I build a funky tree house by myself when I was 11 years old. In highschool, I had an unusual and enthusiastic art teacher, Sigrid Raedler, who exposed us to DADA, Bauhaus, Expressionism and post-war German art, especially to Joseph Beuys, with such rigor that I decided to become an artist.
In the Bay area I attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, (now minus the Crafts) and received a BFA with an Individualized Major in Textiles and Sculture. Many of my early art projects dealt with concepts of the "everyday" -- with time, history and memory and with a focus on process rather than a finished product.
Favorite materials included found objects, clothes, paper, wood and books.
One project was called "Memory Balls". For about a year I collected clothes, bed and table linens. Each one was ripped into long strips and then tightly wound into a ball. Each ball had a label describing what they used to be. If the clothes had belonged to somebody, I returned the whimsical and tightly wrapped ball for them to keep as a memory...
Later in Graduate school at UC Irvine, California, I received an MFA in Studio Art. I added photography, digital media, drawing and installation to my creative repertoire.
In Irvine, I examined topics such as place and how I related to them in terms of time, history, gender and class. I became fascinated with urban planning and layout patterns (especially in planned communities, which are in stark contrast to the typical grid patterns of cities). I was also fascinated by sprawl and how it impacts the social composition of a place.
I enlarged map sections (often 200 to 2,000 per cent) and redrew them in dark graphite. They either became even more seductively decorative or , because they were so enlarged, they loomed over the viewer, resembling viruses or cell mutations.
I also took snapshots whereever I went and made them into one-of-kind postcards which I mailed to myself with notes about traveling, navigating a new space and quotes from urban planners, architects and philosophers. I ended up with a record of my time in Irvine that I displayed as a lerge house of cards.
Back in the Bay Area, I worked on a large-scale grant project from the Creative Work Fund with The Body Positive, a non-profit creating educational materials (videos, books, lectures, workshops) to tackle cultural issues such as weight, self-esteem, eating disorders, gender and food biases. The project involved a lot of sewing and hand-stitching, embroidery, cutting, piecing and re-using existing clothes. Together with The Body Positive constituents, I developed a collection of garments called Alterations which were altered to convey feelings, fears, frustrations and celebrations of the body in this day and age. The project revealed the complexities of fashion and clothes in relation to gender, race and identity. The Alterations project helped inspire me to continue sewing, to start Loulen Studio and slowly grow it into a business.
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