About a year ago, I began to notice simplified pictograms of roads sweeping by along the highway, printed on trucks and on RVs. Despite their scaled-down image and the speed which they passed me by, I could clearly read them as roads, narrowing towards the horizon. My eyes were drawn to their shared generic look, with only slight changes detectable. It was as if they were different versions of the same idea. 

I was on my way to a small town called Solnhofen in southern Germany, located in the heart of Bavaria. With me in the passenger seat was my girlfriend Mari, who for some reason had agreed on my idea to spend our vacation in this rural town. Solnhofen is a place known for their fossils from the Jurassic period, with findings from excavations in the 150 million year old chalk stone. I wasn’t aware of this when we were driving on the Autobahn on our way there. My interest in the visit was not the fossils, but the lithographic stones that are produced in the area. Later I got to know that these histories have a lot in common. Not only are they made of the same material, chalk stone, but they share the tradition of Book of Nature, the idea of reading the world as a book. The idea has been recurring to me in the last years, informing my practice from the background. In this text I will try to bring some clarity on why this topic interests me, and expand on its relation to my artistic practice.