“Bottles” is a long-term artistic project launched in 2020 that investigates artificial worlds of signifiers amid which we move as though in a second nature. It revolves around the PET water bottle as an aesthetically charged symbol that bridges the gulf between the yearning for nature and technologized reality and can be harnessed to grapple with questions of aesthetics, representation, and cultural heritage.

The bottle promises what, by the same token, it subverts: purity and pristineness. Its highly technologized design fuses functionality with deceptively familiar images of nature. Mountains, waves, and drops serve as abstract visual formulas representing nature, archetypes of an imagined state untouched by humans, but also as vehicles of economic interests. In this way, the bottle is fraught with a synthetic, culturally coded formal language that makes nature available for consumption as a signifier.

The water bottle is an ideal material for art: in everyday use, it is yet distinctive in its shape. It resembles a latter-day torso—the abstraction of a body’s silhouette, molded by the principles of consumerism, covered with emblematic patterns and filled with the promise of purity. Its rotation-symmetrical structure and ornamental surface reliefs accommodate conceptual as well as musical modes of expression.

I analyze the bottle body as an aesthetic code and translate it into new pictorial and spatial “landscapes.” Employing analog and digital techniques, I devise a visual vocabulary that finds articulation in drawings, sculptures, installation art, wall pieces, and performances—compositions in which the formal language of industry and the imprint of the individual hand overlap.