Olivia

“When I was sick it was ter­ri­ble for me because I could­n’t do any­thing that I want­ed to do. I could only lie in bed and not even hold my head upright. I tried to cre­ate lit­tle things on the days when I felt bet­ter. But it was incred­i­bly annoy­ing that I had to ask my moth­er for EVERYTHING: please bring me the embroi­dery thread, please thread the nee­dle for me, please cut the rib­bon for me… And my moth­er was always so wor­ried, that if I exert­ed myself too hard I would feel worse the next day. That was annoy­ing too. Becom­ing too exhaust­ed from embroi­der­ing, total­ly ridicu­lous, but true.

I made the draw­ings for the exhi­bi­tion in the hos­pi­tal, where it was always par­tic­u­lar­ly bor­ing and extreme­ly stress­ful at the same time. It was dif­fi­cult to draw because I could­n’t lift my head and thus always had a sil­ly angle to the paper. It was a game: I drew while lying down and Mom had to guess which scene from the last few days I want­ed to depict. When she guessed it, she wrote it below. This way we were often able to laugh about moments that actu­al­ly were pathet­ic. So I start­ed keep­ing a draw­ing diary, which I actu­al­ly kept doing until I felt much bet­ter. Since then, I rarely draw in it. But I always like to look at it and I like to show it, too.”