A fellow artist gave me the first hint of this connection many years ago.

In her eyes, the fragile stelae were abstract self-portraits that I had made of myself. Self-portraits that asked the question of how much I could carry, how much I could endure before I would break.

At the time, I saw this as an interesting expression of opinion, but I didn't really take it seriously. For me, the stelae were more artistic attempts at technical aspects of stone, a game with tensile strength, born out of my training as a stonemason.

In retrospect, however, I think that this artist may have recognized something that I didn't see at the time.

Even today, I can't answer the question whether I really created an image of myself with these sculptures. But what is true is that these abstract sculptures, even if I didn't intend them that way, have a connection to the human figure.

Evidence of this could be that over the years, viewers have repeatedly told me that my fragile stelae reminded them of the large stone heads of the Easter Island (although they are not particularly fragile), i.e. of a human form.

Back to fragility.

In the Srebrenica sculpture, a heavy block of Norit rests on slender columns, symbolizing the city and its inhabitants who have to bear this burden. How long they can do this is not certain.

The breakage is, in a sense, already pre-programmed, and ultimately it has occurred in a catastrophic and criminal way.

Yes, and of course my marble flowers are fragile too.

This means that whether a sculpture weighs tons or only a few grams, the theme of fragility runs through a large part of my work.

And when I think about it carefully, there is another theme: people and the consequences of their actions.

This is independent of how big or small all these sculptures are, whether their representation is figurative, as in my concentration camp memorial, or whether they can be guessed at abstractly, as in the fragile steles.

But even where neither of the two is the case, where a human form is neither clear nor can be meaningfully interpreted in a sculpture, as in Srebrenica or the marble flowers, people and their actions are almost always an inherent part of my work.