A Mythology of Perception

Images do more than represent the world. They shape how we experience it, influencing what we recognize, what we believe and what we imagine to be possible. Yet the meanings we attach to images are never entirely fixed. They shift with context, knowledge, memory and imagination.

In my artistic practice, I approach images as living matter, capable of changing form, acquiring new identities and entering into unexpected relationships. Through processes of transformation, historical photographs and illustrations are released from their original purposes and begin to take on lives of their own. A medical photograph may become a sculptural figure, a scientific illustration an enigmatic artefact. What once served to document or explain reality becomes the starting point for something unfamiliar.

These transformations do not simply challenge existing representations or replace one interpretation with another. They are also acts of creation. As images are displaced, fragmented, recombined and translated into physical forms, new figures, objects and relationships emerge. Each transformation opens up possibilities for further transformations, allowing an expanding visual world to develop from the material of the one we already know.

In my work, this world takes shape as a constellation of ambiguous figures, sculptural fragments and seemingly autonomous objects. They evoke associations with anatomy, archaeology, ritual, science and mythology, without belonging entirely to any of these domains. Together, they suggest a world governed by its own evolving logic, where forms appear connected through processes of resemblance, mutation and metamorphosis.

I describe this evolving world as a mythology of perception.

Mythology, in this context, does not refer to established myths or mere symbolic narratives. It describes the emergence of a world in which images acquire relationships, histories and meanings that extend beyond their origins. Like mythology, this world offers imaginative ways of connecting things that might otherwise appear unrelated. It does not propose an alternative truth, but opens up different possibilities for experiencing and understanding that thing we call reality.

Perception is central to this process. What we see is never determined by an image alone, but emerges through an interplay of sensory experience, memory, knowledge and imagination. By transforming familiar images into unfamiliar forms,  recognition becomes uncertain and perception itself comes into focus. Viewers encounter objects that seem strangely recognizable yet resist identification, inviting them to question not only what they are seeing, but how meaning arises in the act of seeing.

In this sense, a mythology of perception exists between discovery and invention. Its forms originate in the visible world, yet through transformation they become part of a reality that did not previously exist. The boundaries between image and object, representation and presence, the familiar and the uncanny become increasingly fluid.

Rather than presenting a finished imaginary universe, Hauser's work proposes an open-ended world in continuous formation. One in which images are not merely representations of reality, but active participants in its ongoing construction. Through their transformation, new ways of seeing become possible, and with them, new worlds to imagine.