31 Threads of Pain – On art, pain, and the beginning of my blog

With this post, I'm starting something new: my blog. I want to use this space to write about my art, my work at the intersection of science and culture – and above all, about my migraine.

Migraine has been with me for as long as I can remember. Even as a child, I regularly had these problems with headaches and nausea. Only later did they get a name. My father and grandmother also suffered from migraine – an invisible family line that quietly runs through the generations. Since puberty, I've been intensively dealing with my condition: I keep pain diaries, have tried therapies, visited clinics, and changed doctors. Some treatments have helped, others haven't – and sometimes everything changes again.

Over time, I've come to understand that I can't "work" against my migraine, but rather have to live with it. Art has become my most important language. For several years now, I've been processing my chronic migraine in my artistic work – not as a medical issue, but as a space for experience. I try to make the invisible visible: light sensitivity, pressure, throbbing, exhaustion – but also the moments of clarity that follow.

That's precisely why I dedicated this year's Inktober to the theme of "migraine." Inktober is about daily drawing in a global community. Every day in October, there's a different prompt (concept) to be interpreted artistically. I've been using Inktober since last year to delve deeper into digital drawing. I work a lot with inspiration, reference images, and create collages, which I then translate into hatched drawings.

In 2025, the series "31 Threads of Pain" was created. Every day I produced a small work – spontaneously, intuitively, without striving for perfection. The exciting thing for me was that I didn't know beforehand what it would become. Every line, every layer is a thread of my experience. Some images depict pain, others periods of calm, some frustration. Together they form a kind of visual diary, a drawn record of my migraine, my energy, my limitations, and my creative ways of dealing with them.

In the future, I would like to write more about this in this blog: about my artistic processes, about the connection between art and science, about cultural perspectives on body and perception – and about everyday life with chronic migraine.

It changes perception, rhythm and thinking – and, paradoxical as it sounds, it can also be an inspiration.

If you like, check out 31 Threads of Pain .