Simone Eisele

In my work I try to give the feeling of peeking through a keyhole into a mysterious and intriguing looking room, giving that sense that this room could somehow reveal a door into a whole hidden world.

My fantasy is made out of the primary world - our world and its everyday life - with a profound fascination for tradition and folk rituals and how these themes are staged in their domestic environment. By appropriating imagery of commercialised celebrations like Halloween or Valentine’s Day, combined with the material of enigmatic carnival ceremonies or street parades, I arrange a rather odd meeting of things, symbols and events. This in turn becomes something that is at once humorous and uncanny, cute and scary, fantastic and real. Imagine a daydream blurring the line between memory and fantasy, that evokes both pleasant and melancholic thoughts.

Growing up reading the Grimm Brother’s fairy-tales, Harry Potter and Tolkien’s the Lord of the Rings, I learned by means of stories the meaning of escapism - to visit worlds (secondary worlds) that make you forget the unpleasantness of our time - to which i try to relate to in my practice. I have always been seeking material in these narratives but also in their revivalism in films and theme parks, as well as in gardens, playrooms and on the streets - places where children use toys and street chalk, cardboard and commonplace objects to create their very own world of imagination. 

During the process I am always excited to explore new materials, to learn about their qualities and to use their characteristics as a device to amplify the meaning of my work. By looking at animation films (both 2D and 3D) and their way of stretching and overturning cosmic laws up to adorable silliness, I get an idea of how certain effects can create an illusional change in the appearance and physics of certain materials. So that in the end there is a humorous link between materiality and context.