I am a fiber artist living in Budapest, Hungary, working with recycled paper, textiles and other found soft materials. My pieces are created mainly by machine stitching, with additional elements of printing, dyeing and painting. I started making art quilts after a carrier as a mathematician while recently my interest has turned to creating translucent wall-hangings and installations using ripped, overprinted newspaper. I also create objects from paper pulp of rush and sedge that I harvest and cook myself.
As an urban citizen the main theme of my work revolves around ideas that reflect our relations to urban life. I draw inspiration from the graphical appearance of urban maps, old and new, real and imaginary. I regard a city’s street network as its skeleton — a foundation for features that bring people together or fling communities apart, an imprint of times showing how society uses or abuses our place of living. With the multi-layered surfaces of abstract maps I’m striving to grasp moments of finding our place both physically and mentally. Maps are imprints of our living in a system, and like labyrinths they offer a rich ground for associations, deepening our understanding of our life and circumstances. As the urban structure develops, widens, thickens, clots and creates subsystems in history, the cities that live within us undergo an endless and continuous evolution. As experimentation and research have been the primary tools for developing ideas, labyrinth like maps with many dead-end streets has been a visual metaphor of my journey to discover my own identity.
The choice of materials plays a central role in my work. From the beginning I have worked with various used textiles, which I have inherited and received from friends. I feel more conscious of environmental issues when I recycle material trying to draw attention to the environmental impact of waste; while tons of garments end up in the dump, we still keep the same level of consumption. I also like to experiment with used materials that I up-cycle to give them new connotations: spoilt X-ray films, computer keyboard integrated circuit films and buttons, discarded electric and chicken-wires and plastic covering sheets from constructions wastes. Recently I have mainly used newsprints that play a central role in my work as they provide further visual experiences by their ephemeral character. They are fragile; the content is obsolete sometimes already at the hour of appearance while still bearing fragments of important details from the recent past. They deliver deluges of information from which we must sift out the true from the fake. I use them in my recent translucent works capturing the play of opaque and open elements that play an important role: the shadow behind the work adds another layer of complexity.
