In Pieces

— a reintroduction

Well. Here we are again.

If you've been following me for a while—in various dusty corners of the internet—you might already know a bit about what I do. If not, here’s the short version: I’m a collage and graphic artist with a checkered history, a well-worn studio habit, and a tendency to overthink things just enough to ruin an otherwise pleasant afternoon.

I set up this newsletter three years ago, I think. It’s been sitting here quietly, gathering virtual dust, while I dealt with other, louder things. This is, technically, my third attempt to get back to regular writing. The day-to-day pull of platforms-that-must-not-be-named (some of you will know which ones and why) kept me too busy though—but also kept getting more and more superficial, and frustrating. The quickness of it all, the way nuance slips through the cracks, the way everything starts to feel like a performance. I miss the slower pace of real writing.

This—whatever it turns into—is my new newsletter 3.0. It’s not exactly a blog, though I suppose it is one in spirit. Think of it as a slightly more grown-up continuation of the blog I kept back in the late 2010s, when people still had attention spans and wrote paragraphs instead of hashtags. Even though even those seem to be a thing of the past.

Like many people, I migrated from that slower world to the shinier, faster realm of microblogging—Instagram, mostly. It was fun. Briefly. But eventually, like most platforms engineered or taken over by billionaires with questionable ethics and zero grasp of nuance, it started to feel like a crowded elevator where everyone is shouting about their morning routine and trying to sell you a tote bag. (Which, I admit, I’ve also thought about doing.)

So here I am again. Full circle. Back to long-form, unoptimized thought. A return to slowness. A refusal to shrink big, strange, contradictory ideas down to bite-sized captions or trend-chasing content.

So, what is this?

This newsletter is something between a studio diary, a personal essay, and a creative memo to self. It’s where I’ll be writing about:

• The mess and mystery of the art-making process

• What it means to be an artist in an ever-faster, ever-weirder media landscape

• My cautious curiosity about AI (and whether it’s plotting to replace me)

• The evolving shape of my practice over time

• How moving between cultures, countries, and languages continues to shape what I make

• Books I virtually dog-ear, images I can’t stop looking at, things I overheard and scribbled down in a rush, thinking I wish I had thought about that.

What it won’t be:

• A newsletter with a “value proposition”

• A collection of tips on how to “monetize your creativity”

• A substitute for therapy (though I make no promises)

What you’re reading now: not the beginning, not the end.

I’m somewhere in the strange, expansive middle of being an artist. Not emerging. Not retiring. Just here—still making, still questioning, still occasionally forgetting where I left the scissors.

I’ve lived in more places than I can list without sounding like I’m bragging (I am not), and that constant movement has shaped everything about how I work. There’s always been a sense of in-betweenness in my studio and work: layered materials, cultural references I don’t always explain, a fascination with what gets lost in translation—literal or otherwise.

Why write?

Before I studied art, I studied literature and history—so writing has always been the scaffolding under everything else. Even in the studio, I think in sentences. Jotting down half-thoughts in notebooks I’ll never look at again. Rearranging fragments in my head while slicing paper or hunting for images. This newsletter is just an extension of that habit: writing my way through the practice, around its edges, and sometimes directly into its center.

I don’t promise wisdom. But I do promise honesty. And the occasional sarcastic aside.

Lastly…

If you’re here, thanks for showing up. No pressure to forward, share, subscribe, or evangelize. But if you want to follow along, I’ll be writing semi-regularly—when I have something to say [at least once a year it seems]. Or when I need to get something out of my head so it stops following me around.

See you soon, I hope,

Petra