After an apprenticeship as art founder in Nuremberg, I spent a year working in the bronze art foundary Alfred Zöttl in Vienna, Austria, working amongst others for such famous sculpturers as Alfred Hrdlicka. I went to Vienna to improve my experience with a very specialized, and by that time, in Germany almost extinct sand casting technique, the so called
. After years of solid and straight forward handicraft education I decided to take up the studies of prehistory, anthropology and geology at the Eberhard-Karls University of Tübingen, Germany. I intended, and still do intend to go back to the roots of casting and metal crafts and to do research in this field. At that time I began to reconstruct prehistoric tools of the Urnfield culture. Several comissions for open air museums in Germany followed.
After the intermediate exams I changed to the University of Cape Town, to complete a Master of Science on rock art in close cooperation with the Cederberg Rock Art Survey Project, which was founded by Conny Meister and me. During that time I developed a mutimedia CD on Rock Art, The Mantis, the Eland and the Hunter, for the Clanwilliam Living Landscape Project, with an audio comment by Prof. Parkington of UCT. While in Cape Town I used my spare time to build up work experience with goldsmithing and jewellery techniques. In December 2003 I graduated.
Between 2003 and 2005 I did a lot of work mediating between archaeological science and laymen holding courses and seminares on ancient bronze casting in museums, schools and dedicated societies. By the end of 2005 I resumed my studies and started my PhD at University College London on medieval copper smelting in Hartz mountains in northern Germany in close cooperation with the excavating archaeologist Dr. Lothar Klappauf of the Landesdenkmalamt Niedersachsen.
Motivation
Although my work is primarily concerned with objects, Í am interested in more than just the objects itself. It is the information about human beings of the past I am after. It is the history of human creativity I am focussing on, since the creativity allowed, and stil allows us to react to ever changing needs of our existence. It is not the creativity often referred to in the fine arts, it is much more. The creative combination of tradition, knowledge and experience can lead to new developments that sometimes allow for advancements for mankind.
A starting point for my archaeological and archaemetric work are, of course, the artefacts and my personal experience as craftsman in the field of non-ferrous metal works. I intend to identify the way an artefact was manufactured. This happens by employing several means of examination, starting at a macroscopic level. Further investigations include microscopic and compositional studies as, well as comparison with well results of well documented experiments, which are subject to the same examinations. If I am able to prove similarities between artefact and experiment we are close to the original production sequence. We are still separated through time, so our research cannot prove the way any given artefact was produced, but we are on the very safe side with our guess.
The close examination of a find and the reconstruction of teh manufacturing process, or chaîne operatoire, can sometimes open a window with a very high resolution image of the mind of the producing person, espaecially, if things went wrong. It is astonoshing to observe, recorded in an object, the frustration of a person who has long since disappeared...
After an apprenticeship as art founder in Nuremberg, I spent a year working in the bronze art foundary Alfred Zöttl in Vienna, Austria, working amongst others for such famous sculpturers as Alfred Hrdlicka. I went to Vienna to improve my experience with a very specialized, and by that time, in Germany almost extinct sand casting technique, the so called Stückformverfahren. After years of solid and straight forward handicraft education I decided to take up the studies of prehistory, anthropology and geology at the Eberhard-Karls University of Tübingen, Germany. I intended, and still do intend to go back to the roots of casting and metal crafts and to do research in this field. At that time I began to reconstruct prehistoric tools of the Urnfield culture. Several comissions for open air museums in Germany followed.
