“Cave” was born out of cracks. Out of the traces of time on the staircase of an old ceramics factory where I once had my studio. Wherever the plaster fell away, shapes appeared – as if the walls themselves were offering me stories. These gaps became entrances into small worlds.
The first drawing – “Girl with a Fish” – emerged spontaneously. I traced the outline of one of the holes in the crumbling plaster with a black marker. From that moment on, four floors and twelve walls became my private cave – a place from which I “extracted” further stories hidden in the damaged surfaces. This is how the series of scenes was born, and the whole project became a form of artistic revitalization of the space.
In this work, the space was never a neutral backdrop – it became a co‑author. I don’t conceal the damage; I reinterpret it, allowing new meanings to grow out of the cracks. “Cave” is a story about how form can arise from accidental deterioration – a visual micro‑history.
At one point, I visited the Chauvet Cave in France. There, for the first time, I felt that my urge to draw on walls is no different from the impulse of people who lived thousands of years ago. The same gesture, the same desire to tell something to the world. I felt an unexpected closeness to them. That experience became the impulse for creating the final scene of the cycle – a contemporary reinterpretation of one of the drawings from Chauvet.
A few years later, I had to leave my studio in the old factory. Only the drawings remained on the staircase walls – fragile traces of a story I co‑created with that place. Out of longing for them came the need to transfer the entire cycle into a new form: through photography, graphic elaborations, and painting, so that it could continue to exist as an independent project.