Through connecting different media such as photography and sculpture, my work reveals connections between human beings and our environment. I achieve this by carefully selecting people I work with to create an environment that visualizes their internal connections to their surroundings. I combine opposite concepts like fragility and vulnerability, or strength and power, to draw attention to perhaps challenging internal processes and feelings. I often achieve this by contrasting and interchanging the animate and inanimate. Staged settings, precise movements or physical actions help display the tension between these contraries.
I choose to work in a series with each subject to create “allegoric threads“ that, at first, are beautiful, but also deeply symbolic and meaningful. By adding situation-based clothing or surreal props, a fantastical twist can often be found in the narratives. Through them I ask questions about leaving childhood, coming of age, and what it means to find one’s place within our society. Layering all of these steps, the imagery thus becomes a transcript of a personal story between someone and something.
Franziska Kolling is an artist who lives and works in Mainz, Germany. She is currently pursuing her graduate degree at Johannes Gutenberg University and Kunsthochschule Mainz.
She spent a year studying at California State University, Chico in 2018, where she also worked on a collaborative project with San Francisco based artist Gyöngy Laky. Though she primarily worked digitally beforehand her love for materials and hand-on processes such as metal casting were sparked and developed through her experiences during this time. In 2019, she showed her newest body of work in her first solo exhibition fraigaist at the Master of Fine Arts Gallery at CSU Chico.
I choose to work in a series with each subject to create “allegoric threads“ that, at first, are beautiful, but also deeply symbolic and meaningful. By adding situation-based clothing or surreal props, a fantastical twist can often be found in the narratives. Through them I ask questions about leaving childhood, coming of age, and what it means to find one’s place within our society. Layering all of these steps, the imagery thus becomes a transcript of a personal story between someone and something.
Franziska Kolling is an artist who lives and works in Mainz, Germany. She is currently pursuing her graduate degree at Johannes Gutenberg University and Kunsthochschule Mainz.
She spent a year studying at California State University, Chico in 2018, where she also worked on a collaborative project with San Francisco based artist Gyöngy Laky. Though she primarily worked digitally beforehand her love for materials and hand-on processes such as metal casting were sparked and developed through her experiences during this time. In 2019, she showed her newest body of work in her first solo exhibition fraigaist at the Master of Fine Arts Gallery at CSU Chico.