“Touching is one of our basic needs. If we could not use our sense to touch we would suffer mental deprivation.”
(Jan Švankmajer, “Touch and Imagination”, Tauris & Co Ltd., London, 2014 *)

All work created from 2012 – 2018 were based on 3-dimensional figures, but the final stage were 2-dimensional images. Since Sep 2018 I began creating 3-dimensional OBJECTS, using mainly clay.

A photograph is about the past and something that is not here, an object is about the present and what is right there. Many people asked me if I would sell the puppets I use as models in my lens-based media work. But that is impossible, because this work is about IMAGES, memory and ultimately something from the past.
How could something have been there, for example in the 30’s or in the 80’s, and then suddenly it is here in the NOW, unchanged? It does not make sense.
So it is not possible to buy any of these models, they were (very) alive THEN, that is what the work is about, that is why there are photographs and films that talk about that.

The experience with objects should be direct, if it is through a photographic reproduction it wouldn’t be about the object, but ultimately about ‘photograph’.
In this category I am making and researching work that is meant to exist best in 3-dimensional form and does not gain any advantage to be viewed in form of a photograph or other lens-based image of itself.

Therefor it seems highly ironic, as always in the case of any object, documenting this category of work visually in 2d by means of photographs on a website; as ironic as advertising a perfume by means of a commercial film it can at best be a fairly abstracted description, because the real essence of it is different.
Same as it would be much better smelling a perfume it is better seeing the sculpture in real time/real place with one’s own eyes.
This discrepancy is part of the process. Please watch here.

[* Jan Švankmajer “Touch and Imagination. An Introduction to Tactile Art” (2014), translated by Stanley Dalby, Sydney Australia by I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., London, original Czech title: “Hmat a Imaginac. Uvod do taktilniho umeni” (tactile experiments between 1974-1983), published 1994 Kozoroh, Prague, Czech Republic]

Josiane Keller “twigs 1, unfired, earthenware, ~3.5 in – 4 in long, diameter 05 in – 2 in” (2018)