The artist as mediator—a research-based artistic practice

Artist Statement

I began as a documentary photographer, convinced that the image was a way of bearing witness. Over decades, that conviction shifted. The camera became less a tool for recording than a threshold—a place where the visible world meets the strata of memory, intuition, and symbolic meaning that underlie it.

My understanding of the artist was reshaped by long, wordless collaboration with dogs. They taught me to read intelligence in gesture, rhythm, and presence; to trust forms of knowing that precede language. From that interspecies proximity I drew a quiet gnosis: knowledge not claimed, but received through sustained attention to another being.

I see myself in a lineage that reaches back to the cave. The first image-makers were not decorating walls; they were mediating between the hunt and the mystery that sustained it, between individual terror and collective survival. The artist-shaman, for me, is not a title of power but a description of function: one who enters the dark, encounters what lives there, and returns with a form that makes the encounter shareable.

The whirling dervish offers another image for this work: a body turning at the eye of the storm, holding a point of stillness while the cosmos spins around it. My practice tries to create such centres—spaces where biography, nostalgia, and inherited myth can be recontextualised, not to preserve the past, but to make it generative for the present.

A stay at the Free International University and a near-death experience brought me into direct resonance with Beuys's expanded concept of art. They also forced a reckoning: the myths I carried were not ornaments but tools. I work now with a mythopoetic stance, treating memory and longing as active materials for individuation and conscious cosmic participation.

My research moves across photography, performance, writing, and participatory situations. It is process-led and experimentally disciplined. The aim is not to transmit a vision, but to create conditions in which others can access their own creative and transpersonal resources—to become mediators of their own becoming.