Artist's Statement

From Christiane Drieling:

Paper material of all sorts has an emotional fascination for me; therefore, it is the main element of my mixed media collages. I love the feel of paper, the smell, the words, the images. I love the way paper is full of told and untold stories, the different ways paper is composed and how it will fall apart eventually. Just like us.

My collages deal with individual dilemmas and interpersonal conflicts, with culture clashes, political issues, and societal visions. Through the use of book clippings from miscellaneous sources, especially children's books, my stories come into view as being innocently playful or outrageously surreal.

The messages of my collages are the result of both my upbringing in Germany and my professional background as a sociologist and writer. I often refer to well-known German traditions of storytelling but like to continue and expand these narratives. Images of people, animals, objects, and words are regrouped, revived, and assigned new roles and functions. The protagonists of my stories go outside their limits by leaving their book homes and original stories behind and stepping into new unwritten ones.

I like to incorporate familiar elements into my visual stories, such as fragments of folksongs and folktales, traditional games, proverbs, common knowledge, and standard procedures, as well as current discussion topics, prominent figures, historical markers, and stereotypical images. As stories intertwine, they question each other's realities and notions.

As I see it, paper is an infinite yet non-permanent universe encapsulated in the non-paper one. It is an additional dimension, and I see my work as one of many portals to it. In this spirit, I like to overlay the stories with comical and absurd elements to invite further viewing. My stories have no beginning and no end and no punchline. Instead, they stop with a colon to leave plenty of room for individual conclusions.