Forbidden Life

★ Diplom Work University of Applied Arts Vienna / Die Angewandte 

★ 240x240cm

★ wool, acrylic yarn

★ 2025

★ photos by Yannick Stross

★ get in touch for more details 

Forbidden Life is a large-scale hand-tufted tapestry that explores the emotional,

structural, and symbolic contradictions of freelance creative work. Rooted in personal

experience, it reflects the tension between the desire for self-realization and the

reality of self-exploitation.

As a young freelance artist, I move through a landscape shaped by unpaid labor, tight

deadlines, aesthetic pressure, and the fear of being replaceable. Creative passion

often gets entangled with invisible demands — performative productivity, algorithm-

friendly content, brand-like identities.

The tapestry visualizes these tensions through a fragmented, overloaded image world:

cartoon characters, nostalgic icons, pop aesthetics, and surreal details. Familiar

figures are placed in unfamiliar situations — exhausted, overwhelmed, caught in

contradiction. What seems playful at first reveals a deeper struggle with visibility,

care, expectation, and burnout.

There is no clear boundary between work and rest. No defined space between what’s

personal and what becomes part of the portfolio. Even moments of silence are turned

into content. The piece doesn’t offer solutions — instead, it makes visible what often

remains hidden behind curated images of freedom and success.

this work invites you to pause, feel, and sit with contradiction — without rushing to

resolve it.

About the Characters in This Work

The characters featured in this piece are not chosen at random. Each one is a well-

known figure from popular culture – from cartoons, commercials, games, or children’s

media.

In their original settings, they often stand for clarity: joy, strength, loyalty,

optimism, or harmless fun. But here, they are placed in unfamiliar, emotionally

charged situations that shift their meaning.

In my version, the cheerful ones are exhausted. The helpful ones start to fall apart.

The strong ones are doubting themselves.

This change is intentional. I use these figures to reflect inner states that are often

hard to express: burnout, over-identification, pressure to perform, or the feeling of

needing to smile while breaking inside.

The work plays with what happens when we recognize something familiar – but it no

longer behaves the way we expect. These characters are not here to entertain. They’re

here to feel.

How do you show something that doesn’t want to be seen?

This work began as an attempt to make inner states visible – burnout, performance

pressure, the need to be seen, and the simultaneous longing to disappear.

Forbidden Life is not a linear story, but a condensation of emotions and

contradictions. A textile space where exhaustion and visibility, care and collapse,

ambition and doubt coexist.

I chose tapestry not only as a material, but as a language. Textiles speak through

repetition, tension, and time. Every thread in this work is part of the question:

What does freedom mean when it comes with unpaid labor?

What is productivity in a creative field that constantly questions itself?

The piece was made without funding, in over 90 hours of physical, unpaid labor. That

effort is not separate from the content – it reflects it. This is not just a visual

statement, but a lived one.

It doesn't aim to explain. It invites you to pause. Maybe not to understand, but to

feel something.