For many years I have worked with portraits. Series of sculptures that are connected by a variation of themes based on theories of how we perceive other people by their outer appearance. For example, I have worked on a series that has its origin in an old-fashioned theory named Physiognomy, which in the 18th Century was made popular by the Swiss philosopher and pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater. Lavater stated that there is a direct relation between outer appearance and inner self and that you can learn to read ones character in his or her face. (Lavater, 1775) This theory was commonly accepted through to the 20th Century, though later questioned due to its connections to eugenics, theories on race and the Holocaust, thereby being shrouded in shame and finally becoming obsolete as a scientific theory. Nevertheless, after WWII and even up till the present day, there are and were people like the German authors Burger and Nöttling who propagate Physiognomy as a matter of fact. (Burger-Nöttling, 1958)

A series of sculptures that arose from the series on Physiognomy is a suite on racial biology or eugenics. Figurative sculpture put in a context where I question our ideas about race and "the Other".