Question (F.): What are your inspirations?

I.H.: The most important inspiration is nature. In nature I find everything from colors to structures to moods and from beauty to violence.

I also find inspiration in everyday life. It can be a conversation, a chance observation, a visit to an exhibition, a text I’ve read, stories that people tell me from birth to death. Photography itself can also be an inspiration.

I also read philosophical texts, especially on the subject of photography. The writings of Jean Baudrillard “Why hasn’t everything already disappeared” and Vilém Flusser “Towards a philosophy of photography” had a significant influence on me, especially in the phase when I decided on this technique and way of working.

Everything that inspires me is also a motivation.

Q.: How much time does it take to finish a picture?

I.H.: Before I start stitching the image, it has usually been hanging on the wall for a while. I may have already put the image, away once and then taken it out again. I look at the image, until I know what I want. Then I decide how to achieve my intention. This process can take weeks. While I’m working on a piece, I’ll put it down again and again. I always work on several images at the same time. These breaks give me distance and help me to make decisions again. My experience has taught me that images that I have worked on continuously always end up in the wastepaper basket.

In addition to working on the image, there is a long process of generating the photographic basis: the hike, the photographing, the development of the negative and the exposure on the paper. The “images-resting-times” are important to me. Many things also run in parallel. Slowness is an element of my work.

Q.: What is the best compliment?

I.H.: When a person says that they are touched by my pictures or by a picture. When someone is touched, a relationship develops. Where a relationship develops, attention grows, empathy grows, care grows – that’s where “seeing” takes place, as opposed to “overlooking”.

I want to touch people with my work.

Q.: What other feedback are you pleased with?

I.H.: A visitor to an exhibition once told me that since discovering my images, she now distrusts all images. Something has happened, a mistrust has arisen, a sensitivity for real/artificial. These people become critical, they take a closer look. That is a great gift!

Many people tell me about observations in nature. They are often stories of childhood memories. I find that exciting. The word ‚home‘ often comes up.

The reactions are varied. It is important to me that my work can be perceived in many different ways, even though I always depict landscapes.

Q.: Are your works also an environmental policy work?

I.H.: No and yes.

No, because it’s not my theme in these images. I don’t want to lecture or point the finger with my images. I also don’t want to show what has been broken and destroyed.

Yes, because environmental protection means a lot to me. Nature is our habitat. We are destroying it and thus destroying our basis. If someone is touched by my work now, perhaps they will take a new interest in the landscape.

Environmental protection is having a hard time at the moment. Solutions are not in sight, are perceived as unrealizable or are being destroyed again. Particular interests dominate, the focus on money and the fear of loss prevent a clear view of other paths. I believe that reconciliation is needed in order to move forward again. Perhaps my pictures will make a contribution to this. In any case, we need many pictures of landscape and nature so that we don’t forget that we have to take care of the basis of our existence.

Q.: How did you come to add a gesture to the language of photography that is linked to materiality? Is this perhaps related to your role as a sculptor?

I.H.: With sewing, I have a tool with many possibilities in my hand: one time the sewing is closer to a drawing, the next time it is closer to a painting. But each time it’s a sculpture, because I add material with the thread, just as you do with a sculpture, or I can also use the color of the thread to reduce or displace the space. Stitching also gives me the opportunity to keep the added structure transparent like a net or to completely fill and cover an image surface. I use the thread and the needle like a hammer and chisel or like clay. That’s also how I describe myself as a sculptor. Sewing has even more qualities. Even if it looks as if the stitching fits carefully into the photo, the needle is a brutal destruction that has to destroy the image before the thread can build a new reality. The stitching also has something connecting between the reality of the photograph and what is added.

Q.: Sewing is a deeply rooted female gesture. What does it mean to you?

I.H.: This feminine gesture was and is not important to me. For me, sewing has always been a tool with which I can create my visual language.

Q.: How did the first idea, the really first beginning of your image creation, come about?

I.H.: It was during my studies when I worked a lot with photography (at that time it was very rarely landscapes). However, I wasn’t really satisfied with any of the photos. What I saw, the memory, the image, the reality – it all didn’t fit together, I was always missing something.

I had a pile of photos and looked through them again and again. They were ok but I wasn’t satisfied. I knew that I would tear them up. It wasn’t a conscious decision after that, more a spontaneous action without thinking about where it came from and why. I saw the sewing machine and thought that I could destroy the pictures with the sewing machine instead of tearing them up. I took a picture and just sewed back and forth, like scribbling on a piece of paper. I remember it was a picture of the city and a green thread. Nothing special. But it touched me. After that I started experimenting with it and worked on it for two years until I showed the first images. But they were still without color. Then it took a while again until I brought the color into the picture.

After that, there was another break and I actually wanted to stop. When I had a long stay as an artist in residence in Graz, Austria, in 2009, I read a lot about the philosophy of photography. That was actually the conscious decision to pursue and develop this work further.

Q.: What terms would you describe as the language of photography and the analog image?

I.H.: Memory, documentation, copy (of the reality), past, transience, forgetting, dying & death, reproduction, standstill, the frozen moment, light-image, technical image, action, reality, the distanced gaze, simultaneous presence and absence…