When growing up in post-war Germany I was fascinated with the phenomenon of the "rubble hill" (Schuttberg"), a small mountain usually integrated into the city in form of a beautifully groomed park. Many German cities had a hill like that, identified as "Schuttberg" or some like name but with no further explanation posted as to its provinence. Where it not for my father who explained this apparition to me once I would have never known that burried under these well groomed parks were the remains of the cities' destruction during World War II.

This juxapposition of beauty and horror has continued to mesmerize me because it is so metaphoric of the post-war German world I grew up in : obsessively and suspiciously involved with keeping order and normalcy while keeping the emotional chaos from the near past under safe but palpable cover.

"November 9 Quilts" and "November 9 Hide" try to encapsulate this feeling : the juxtapposition of the decorative and the grotesque, the harnessing of human remains for the purpose of distracting and pleasing the eye (hence the refernce to wall-hangings), while also serving as a cover-up (hence the reference to the quilt).

All pieces from this series are made with handmade paper of various kinds with embedded human hair, stiched together and sometimes decorated inconspicuously with script or small objects (rhine stones, fake pearls).

The date November 9 refers to "Kristallnacht" when in 1938 the systematic purge of the Jewish population in central Europe officially began; and to the same date in 1989 when the dividing wall between east and west Germany came down uncovering some of the precariously kept order. November 9 also happens to be my birthday - in 1952. By sharing this date with German history and the history of the Holocaust I see these events as momentarily coalescing on my own skin, the way I feel the inherited memory of my familys' persecution coalescing in my life.


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