Finding shapes that convey the conception of life, like a cell with its membrane, its transitions and its fragility.  That was the initial idea of softbodies some years ago. They grew from a single shape into two, parted or melted into one another. Lines define inner and outer. Fluid gives mass and free flow.
In microscopy one discovers bodies in layers, versions, surfaces become visible or blur into the mass. I felt a need to come closer to that invented body. They became blotchy and hairy,  grew from slices to full bodies. The hair builds a fur-like cover and protects, but the hair is an attractor at the same time, tentacles caressing the air, a promise to caress.
Maybe those shapes needed to be given birth. Maybe body and life cannot be separated from sexuality. My intimate understanding can only be that of a woman. Sensuality can only be based on my own experience. I had to mentally open door after door to connect and accept that fragility, to be able then, to translate. The labia-like shapes evoke sensual pleasure and voluptuousness. They stand for the fragile, vulnerable ‘body’, the hidden secret of an identity. The fine hair grows out of those shapes; it is like nerves lying open.
This work somehow seems to build up on my early research on the figure. I had started with paintings of naked female bodies, strong in their way, to express their pleasure and pain. Young women in urban environments discovering life, screaming out their energy. I consider those paintings as some of the purest and most honest in their direct and simple approach. That innocence was certainly lost within the apprenticeship of becoming an artist.
Living in different countries is an enormous, eye-opening and fulfilling experience. It taught me languages in the broadest sense. It taught me seeing and thinking in all kinds of ways. Every place seems to have its own rules and heroes disregarding the unknown. Adaptation is a learning process going from shovelling in of the new and burying of the old until the latter seeps back through and asks to be reconsidered.  
So it seems, after processes of transformation and reconsideration, I return to body and female sensuality. My work has always been based on life and the human. As I had moved out of the big cities of Berlin and London, the human became more existential and lonely in ‘empty’ spaces of colour fields. Outlines of human figures flit across horizontal spaces. Later, the human figure gained in fleshiness but nonetheless dissolved in the space around.
softbodies-extra are the interim results of a search for sensuality and self-awareness. The human is seen as it may be, raw and fragile, given a shape inspired by the female sex. Hair is considered imperfection on the female body. Women’s bodies are meant to be child-like and ageing of flesh and skin fills women with fear and shame.
The feminine sexual and sensual connotation in the work is evident and dominates over a pure anatomical view. The woman, unlike the man, does rarely see her organs, it demands not only the effort, but also the intellectual approach to do so. I think, to many women, the internalized image of the self is much stronger and more precise than anatomical realities.
What may have started as a life questioning and later a narcissistic pleasure taking, self-mirroring, turned into the search for the opening of body and inevitably of the mind. This demands truthful contact to the self, penetrating consciousness and longings; staying balanced on a tightrope. All drawings are born out of a special moment of concentration. They offer themselves to the viewer; centred and intense.
Body opens, receives, gives way to inner. I seek to create images of this state of being receptive, of the consciousness of the inner and the outer body, of the flow of giving and taking. Being receptive to the other that is nonetheless absent in the work. The other exists through the longing expressed by the one body; it may be subconsciously present, projected or imagined, but it is never given shape. 
Comprehension of the physical body is intertwined with mental equilibrium. I had to unpeel layers of self-protection and defeat self-denial. New boundaries had to be defined. I seek to unveil and find images of mental and physical, vulnerability, of female identity and sensuality. softbodies are like minds conscious of their state of being, able to confront, to transform; strong enough to admit fragility, to receive and to give, despite all.