Illiterate Magazine » featured

Heike Weber

See past features

What is your name?

Heike Weber

Where Are you from?

I live in Cologne, Germany

What do you do?...

I’m a visual artist

What are your current artforms of choice?

I make site specific drawings with different materials. This weekend I finished a huge site specific figurative installation with window-colors on pins in a staircase of a company. And in my studio I figured out how I can realize an all-over structured paper-cutout for an exhibition-space.

How did you first know that you wanted to be an artist?

I used to study graphic-design when I was 18 years old. During my studies I realized, that I don’t want to make advertising. Once a year we went to the Tuscany with the drawing-class and with the preoccupation with the frescos of the early rennaissance, I had that deep emotional and physical feeling of beauty and depth. I felt this disembodyment which is the subject of my current work.

Is your work intended to be interactive? Can people walk through the rooms you've drawn?

It’s absolutly important that the people walk on and through my floor- and roomdrawings. I am interested in floating states, the breakup of solidly conjoined structures. I try to physically integrate the viewer into my ”pictures”. For example, my walk-over floor and space drawings are meant to make the visitor aware of his existence and conscious of his own person by means of how insecure he feels when walking across them. The pictures become metaphors.

Speaking of walking through, what does a brief walk-through of your daily routine look like?

I’m a late night bird and I need 8 hours sleep. So, I’m waking up around 9 or 10, have a huge and long breakfast with the daily newspaper. After that, I check my emails and make phonecalls and office-stuff and in the early afternoon, I go to my studio. Around 10 p.m. I’m getting so hungry that I go home for cooking a nice dinner - mostly with friends.

What is your favorite tool of the trade?

A cutter and an edding marker

You draw on walls, floors and ceilings. Didn't your parents ever tell you that's now allowed?

Ha-Ha – I did it anyway!

Your work all seems to share in common a delicate and obsessive repetition in which the sum of the parts is greater than the individual elements. What is it about doing the same thing over and over again that interests you?

This is only the fact in my floordrawings which relates to the floorplan of the exhibitionspace or the architectual elements in the space. It is a very concentrated and meditative work and I think, the energy of the drawing attacks and attracts the contemplator. It concerns with the time and the here and now.

As far as color and tones go, you seem to work primarily with one at a time. Any particular reason for this monochromatic tendency?

No – not at all – maybe because I’m a drawer and not a painter? I use the color as a symbol of energy. The floordrawings and the flying figures are mostly in Red – it’s the most impassionated color for me.

How is it that you came upon using the different materials that repeatedly show up in your work?

I explore the medium drawing with different stuff. I like to use homely materials or everyday commodities which change it’s appearence and it’s attraction with the formal way I use it.

Without taking into consideration financial or physical restraints, what is your ideal art project?

To bring Art in everybodies mind.

You're an artist living in Germany. What is your art scene like and what's happening there right now.

I live in Cologne and the Rhineland has besides Berlin the biggest artscene in Germany. I think, in Cologe are nearly 2000 professional artists registered. In Düsseldorf is one of the most famous academies of art and in this region are lots of Galleries, Museums and private art institutions and collectors. We have the Cologne Art Fair which opens every april (this week!). The only problem is, that the citys have more and more financial problems so that the institutions depend on private sponsorship.

And finally... Any last words of wisdom you'd like to share with Illiterate?

No words of wisdom, but I’m pleased to have the possibility (because of the internet) to reach people so far away and to get in contact. It’s amazing and I think the network becomes bigger and bigger and thats wonderful.