An artwork can travel business class to an art fair. It can also arrive at your door without asking you to dress for the occasion.

The second journey interests me.

It brings art into the ordinary circumstances of a life: the kitchen table, the book left open, the few minutes before the day begins. An image enters your surroundings. With time, you may begin to recognise something of yourself in it.

Portrait Letter Club is a complete twelve-month journey through twelve archetypes: one physical studio letter and an accompanying signed archetype print each month, sent from my studio in Cologne.

The sequence draws on Archetype Archives, my ongoing photographic exploration of identity and the figures we carry within us.

Everyone begins with Letter 1. Each letter leads to the next. After Letter 12, the correspondence reaches its conclusion and the subscription ends automatically.

Twelve letters. Twelve images. A collection with a beginning and an ending.

Launching in January 2027. The waiting list is now the way to hear when enrolment opens.

The personal story behind the letters

I am a second-generation artist. My parents met in the world of art, and I grew up around drawing, teaching, studio conversations and the serious belief that images matter.

By the age of twelve, I had lived in three countries.

That sounds romantic in a biography. As a child, it meant beginning again: new rooms, new schools, new languages and unfamiliar rules of belonging.

When words were uncertain, I paid closer attention to gestures, expressions and silences. I watched how people occupied a room. Who made space for someone else. Who seemed at ease. Who hesitated.

Looking became a way of finding my bearings.

It also taught me something I still carry into the studio: an expression invites interpretation, but a person always exceeds what we can see.

Portrait Letter Club grows from that attention—and from the experience of discovering that we can inhabit several versions of ourselves within a single life.

Twelve archetypes, without reducing a life to twelve types

We are rarely the same person in every room.

We create, protect, care, question and begin again. A role that once gave us direction may eventually become too narrow. A quality we thought belonged to someone else may become necessary in our own lives.

The twelve archetypes offer a visual and literary way of considering these experiences.

I approach them as an artist: through faces, gestures, atmosphere and the associations an image can awaken. They are symbolic figures to encounter and interpret, rather than categories into which a person must fit.

You may recognise yourself immediately in one. Another may feel unfamiliar, even unwelcome. That, too, can be worth attending to.

Recognition is only one possible encounter with art. Resistance can be another.

The sequence offers a deliberate order for reflection. Your life remains free to disagree with it.

The artwork gives it a face. The letter gives it language.

Each month, an archetype becomes the subject of a print and a letter.

The image offers something to look at repeatedly. The letter explores the human questions around it: responsibility, courage, tenderness, authority, change and the difficulty of leaving a familiar role.

These questions come from my studio and from a life that has required its own share of beginning again.

Life has not always felt soft to me. I know that becoming yourself can take years.

I write with people in mind who carry more than others can see. People entering a new country, a new responsibility or an unfamiliar chapter. People who have become very good at being strong and are reconsidering what strength should ask of them.

The letter is written beside you. From one life in progress to another.

You can read it in one sitting. You can disagree with it. You can put it away and discover, months later, that a sentence has acquired a different meaning.

Why the journey takes a year

An image can be seen in a second. Living with it takes longer.

The monthly interval gives each archetype time to remain in view before the next arrives. You might place the print beside your books, keep the letter on your desk or return to both after something in your life has shifted.

Over twelve months, those encounters form a sequence.

The letters are conceived as a complete cycle. Whenever you join, you begin at the beginning: Letter 1, followed by Letter 2, continuing through to Letter 12.

Joining later does not mean arriving halfway through someone else’s story.

There is also a reason for the ending. A finite work asks something different of its maker: the sequence must have shape, each part must earn its place, and the conclusion must matter.

After the twelfth mailing, the journey is complete. What remains is yours to revisit.

Why a physical letter?

We live in a time of constant contact and very little correspondence.

A physical letter has a particular presence. You open it with your hands. You choose when to read it. You decide where it belongs.

The print remains after the first encounter. It may become part of the room almost unnoticed, until one day you find yourself looking at it differently.

Artists have long used the post as a means of exchange and artistic circulation. MoMA’s Analog Network: Mail Art 1960–1999 traces the correspondence networks that developed around these possibilities, including those associated with Ray Johnson.

Portrait Letter Club takes inspiration from that history within its own format: a defined series of prints and letters from one artist’s studio.

The scale is intimate. The questions need not be small.

What arrives—and what remains

Over the complete journey, you receive twelve physical studio letters and twelve accompanying signed archetype prints, delivered one month at a time.

You can display the images individually, arrange them together or keep the sequence as a personal archive.

One letter may remain associated with a decision. Another with a person. A print you initially overlook may become the one you return to most.

A collection begins to acquire meaning through those relationships.

The letters also offer an intimate introduction to Archetype Archives. If a particular figure stays with you, you can explore its place within the wider body of work and the available artworks.

The twelve-part collection is complete in itself. Further collecting can follow your curiosity, in your own time.

A year of correspondence, given to someone else

Portrait Letter Club is also being prepared as a gift: a complete sequence sent to the recipient, beginning with the first letter.

There is something particularly thoughtful about a gift that returns.

The first envelope announces it. The following letters give the recipient new occasions to pause, look and read throughout the year.

It might mark a birthday, a transition or simply the wish to send someone something chosen with care. The recipient brings their own meanings to it.

An invitation to begin

You may already collect art. You may be considering your first signed print. You may simply love the prospect of receiving a letter worth keeping.

Portrait Letter Club offers a year in the company of twelve images and the questions they open.

Enrolment is planned to open in January 2027. Until then, you can join the waiting list to receive the launch details, confirmed membership options and information about the first mailing.

Join the Portrait Letter Club waiting list →

After twelve months, the letters stop.

The conversation with the images can continue.