Karen Baldner crosses her legs, takes a sip of her Newman's Royal Tea and begins to tell the story of how she turns traumatic events into pieces of art.
Baldner, a professor at the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), gave a presentation during lunch yesterday about her artwork.
During the presentation, she spoke about how her parents' survival of the Holocaust has empowered her to inspire others with her pieces.
"My work is about paradox," Baldner said. "That is the gist of my entrance. It's about conflict, about unresolved situations and places and people."
Baldner, who grew up as a Jew in Munich, Germany, has been bombarded with stories about her parents' experiences throughout the Holocaust. She explains that her father was kicked out of high school at the age of 14 for being half-Jewish.
Baldner was constantly wary of those around her, given that those who were her neighbors had recently been bystanders of her parents' own torture.
"I grew up right in the middle of the perpetrator," she said, "and it was a very uncomfortable environment."
Her parents' struggles have influenced her life immensely, especially as she was growing up. She explains that she did not complain much growing up, because her parents would always relate her struggles back to their own during their time in captivity.
"At the table, if you don't finish your food then that's in a sense an insult to the past," Baldner said. "If you're not happy with your clothes and you're complaining that its not fashionable that's an insult because they didn't have any...Any one of my issues in puberty were nothing compared to moments like that and decisions like that."
At the presentation Monday, Baldner discussed many of her unique artistic endeavors. The focus of the presentation surrounded her art of bookmaking, in which pieces are put side-by-side in a book format. The artist creates everything, from the pieces to the paper itself.
Sophomore Molly Rinehart had never previously heard of bookmaking, and was intrigued when Baldner began to describe her work.
"I never heard of the art of bookmaking," Rinehart said. "I've always just thought books are what you get published, but I've never seen it in a print artistic form."
Most students were surprised that, in her bookmaking, Baldner sometimes binds her books with human hair.
"Hair doesn't die," she said during the presentation. "For me, that's the meaning of it."
Sophomore Jordan Lienhoop thought that, while her incorporation of human hair was a bit bizarre, the meaning behind it made the use of hair interesting.
"The incorporation of hair definitely was shocking," Lienhoop said, "but I think it really added to the work."
Another project that Baldner has been working on for years, entitled "The Bloomington Breast Project," consists of women taking casts of their breasts with plaster, and displaying the casts in areas around Bloomington. So far, approximately 250 casts have been made and displayed in public areas in Bloomington.
"We take casts of our breasts in plaster, and then we use that as a matrix for further casts," she said.
Baldner explains that she was elated to come to DePauw University, because she believes that she can have a greater impact with her artwork than someone who has not had the experiences that she has had.
A series of wall hangings that she is currently working on revolves around a particular story that he father told her. She explains that she and her father were at a park in Munich, when he explained to her that the park that they were walking through had much of the rubble from the war buried underneath it, including dead bodies and homes destroyed by bombs.
"He said, 'You know what's under us here? Half of Munich is buried under this,'" she said. "There's a lot of mourning that never happened."
Leinhoop enjoyed the incorporation of Baldner's history into her artwork, and thought that this gave her artwork a personal touch.
"I liked how, in her artwork, she incorporates her history, her past, her ancestry," she said, "and also things that she confronts today with her being Jewish and German.
First-year Madison McIntyre was especially impressed with a piece that portrays Baldner's identity struggle, what with being both German and Jewish.
"There was one piece she showed us of a cast of her face with multiple half faces on both sides," McIntyre said. "On one side it had Jewish imprinted in the fibers in English and German and the other side had German imprinted in English and German."
"It means a lot to me to be the one to get this out and to be speaking out as a Jew," Baldner said.
In essence, Baldner wishes to inspire with her art, and she continues to look for different ways to express the events of life through artwork.
"You don't just leave things unturned, you go as far as you can," she said. "I just know the world is rich in metaphor."