Signs and Symbols

This series began during the pandemic when I was alone in my Vienna apartment, unable to travel, cut off from the people and places that had defined my life for decades.

I found myself thinking about CERN. About the work I had done there years before: the search for the fundamental particles that make up all matter. The idea that if you look closely enough at anything, it resolves into a small number of essential forms.

I began to apply that same logic to my own life.

What were the essential shapes of everything I had experienced? A childhood in a divided city. An ocean crossing. An adoption. Decades of working across cultures at the ILO, surrounded by colleagues from 187 countries. A second professional life as an artist, beginning at sixty.

If all of that were reduced to its most fundamental elements - the way matter reduces to particles, the way language reduces to letters - what would remain?

Signs and Symbols is the answer I found.

The works use elementary forms - circles, ovals, squares, arcs - in vibrant, carefully composed arrangements. Some feel cosmic: clusters of colour moving through space like systems of planets. Others feel intimate: marks that suggest writing, music, or the gestures of a hand. All of them carry the quality of something both discovered and invented. They form an alphabet, one not of letters, but of experience. One that anyone, from anywhere, can begin to read.