solo exhibition at Flinder's Lane Gallery, Melbourne, 5-23 Sept 2006

I was standing at the bus stop when an elderly woman approached and started chatting to me while I nodded and smiled in what I hoped were the right places. I waited for a lull in the chatter to say es tut mir leid, ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch, but it never came. The bus arrived a few minutes later, we bid each other a fond farewell and I boarded in a daze wondering how I could actually participate in an exchange without contributing or understanding a single word.

It was but one of many one-sided conversations I had when I first re-located to Zürich in 2001. I wasn't an obvious foreigner, my father’s roots are German and my mother’s Slavic/Polish. Learning the language would become intrinsic to understanding the culture in which I found myself immersed. The gaps or slippages that occur in the learning process, both between and within cultures, is the current focus of my work - what is misinterpreted, misunderstood or just left unsaid.

The works for this exhibition are based on excerpts from antique letters and postcards found at a second hand shop in Zürich. They initially appealed to me because of the time that was invested to sustain and nurture personal relationships through the ritual of putting pen to paper. In contrast to the brief exchange at the bus stop, the handwritten correspondence also allowed me time to absorb intimate information about the lives of the writers. I decided to use these carefully constructed foreign scripts in an attempt to create a visual language of my own, one that might serve as a bridge across cultures when words alone cannot.