Your works are intimately poetic, largely based on personal feelings and your own imagination, but at the same time they have this universal character. Probably for that reason, they can be seen as “contemporary idols”, which are readable for all,  but at the same time, they are mysteriously speaking in different ways to different viewers.  I am actually interested in knowing how you yourself ‘read’ these works. Can you step outside for a moment and let me know what you see?

I can read them, nor do I particularly reflect on their consequences or potential meanings. I just follow the given impetus to make things that come apparent to me. Or I just follow what becomes apparent for me to be attentive to.

As with most of your works, these bronzes, as well as the four of the Standing series, are largely inspired by the visual culture of the past, which ranges from anatomical, natural, and scientific representations from the eighteenth century to the abjection of images of relics, memento mori, folklore, mythology, Byzantine iconography, medieval altarpieces and depictions of the animal world. 

Could you tell us more about the nature of the thought, material, location (either physical, psychological or situational) you were positioned in at the time of making them and how all these references arrived into these works?

I am very drawn to learning about historical visual language.  The best way for me to do that is through the making process. We all inherit such a rich visual culture that takes us all in so many different directions at once. I am just trying to learn through doing.

As most often with art, the representation doesn’t necessarily correspond to the symbolic signifier the author meant to express within the work. I think most of your practice is focused on this dynamic: despite being largely figurative it takes some mysteriously enigmatic character as it draws from real elements just for the allegorical/metaphorical potential they have assumed through our cultural history. 

How would you describe this human relation between reality and its symbolic representation? Why does humankind have most of the time resorted to symbols to map and describe most of the outside and inside phenomena?

I think art is a way that people externally synthesize their experience.  I’m nor particularly trying to express anything overt in my work. I’m only trying to make something I recognize that holds a feeling. It’s never made to be understood. It’s not made to be elusive but if it means anything to other people that meaning comes through them. I’m just looking for a collision of feelings.

I suppose you did a lot of research before building this richly informed visual language, tapping into the collective treasure of shared images and symbols that have been expressed in dreams, art, fairy tales, stories, myths, and religious motifs from across widely different times and cultures. Since most of your works deal with the relation between man and nature, how do you feel both the perception and representation of it have changed through time? 

I have no research other than we all are vessels of all the pasts of the whole world. Certainly the ideas we hold in our consciousness change but that is only a small part of us.

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Paul Maheke