The title “What may have become of you” is a question you ask yourself about someone whom you have had no contact with and whom you have not seen for years. But someday you find yourself wondering how they might have changed and where they are now.

I found myself wondering about my late father. After trying to find a connection to him by asking questions about his past and who he was – which in the end only made me feel more disconnected – I started to imagine how he could still be part of my life. What is left of him are his ashes. In Germany we are not allowed to keep the ashes or scatter them, as they have to be buried by law. In my stories those last pieces of my father live their own life and find their way back into my life, far away from where they were put in the ground. Giving him a second life which is (secretly) entangled with mine.

The stories explore a kind of afterlife which is not so much spiritual but first and foremost one of matter, as everything that dies gives matter back to the earth.

Some of the etching plates of the first book where drawn on, not put in acid, but put in a drawer for more than a year until I was able to work with them again; this resulted in a lot of messy scratches and little damages – which I really appreciate, because I carried the story of my father’s death with me for such a long time.
The story in the first book evolved around some bird poo on my window: a direct link to my everyday life ( I did not remove the bird poo from the window for a long time).
The story in the third book (which I actually made before the 2nd one) is about our shared love of sushi. My father brought me to an authentic sushi restaurant in our hometown ever since I was a little girl.
I think the story of the second book is the most spiritual. I have always felt a deep connection with the element of water and in this book, flowing water is the main character. It is also the one book in which very little happens. It is (almost) as if I have found peace in this story.

My father died in 2005, when I was 14. In 2020 he was dead for 15 years, one year longer than we had lived together. This is the moment that I started with the first book. We had also made books together when I was a child. I would draw pictures and he’d make up a story based on what I drew. This is partly the reason why I chose to make a story with only pictures. And even though these are not made as children's books, I wanted them to be suitable for children and easily understandable.

When I started working on these books I didn´t have a lot of experience in etching. I had tried it one time at the art academy but it was mostly a new technique for me. The indirectness and slowness of the technique gave me the opportunity to let the project and stories develop in their own time, giving me the time to process the death of my father again. Feeling like the child that lost its father in the beginning, which I think is represented in the more childlike drawings in the first book, and growing (up), both mentally and psychologically and in terms of the technique, with each story that manifested.

From November 2024 until March 2025 you can see this work at the “Triennale de Gravure Liége” at Museum La Boverie in Liége, Belgium