Berlin-based artist and spatial designer Sabine Kelka translates the visual language of electrical circuit diagrams into large-scale silkscreen prints on textile, turning engineering notation into something spatial, physical and quietly disorienting.
Electrical circuit diagrams have their own rigorous visual grammar: standardised symbols, precise connections, a language designed for clarity and replication rather than sensation. Sabine Kelka takes that grammar and reassigns it entirely. In Patterns of Perception, the logic of engineering notation is translated onto textile through silkscreen, and what was cold and technical becomes tactile and spatial.
“I was drawn to circuit diagrams because they already function as a kind of abstract visual system,” Kelka says. “By moving them onto fabric, I wanted to ask what happens when a diagram stops being a diagram and becomes an environment.”
The six prints in the series, each on a different textile and measuring 150 by 120 centimetres, explore that question across different surface qualities, with the same geometric composition behaving differently depending on whether it sits on a dark ground, a pale one, or something in between. The minimal colour palette, black, white and subtle grounds, keeps the focus on structure and spatial relationship rather than decoration.
Kelka’s background in Spatial Design from the Berlin University of the Arts runs through everything in her practice. Her graphics always carry a spatial dimension, a tendency to visually distort the space they occupy rather than simply decorating a surface. The large scale of these prints means they operate as environments as much as objects, surrounding the viewer in the same way an electrical system surrounds and conditions the space it runs through.
“A pattern at this scale stops being something you look at,” she says. “It starts to become something you are inside.”
The series was produced in 2022 at SDW, the open silkscreen print studio in Berlin where Kelka is an active member, frequent artist and organiser of exhibitions and workshops.
Sabine Kelka is a Berlin-based artist and designer working across silkscreen print, tape art and painting. Her geometric, colour-reduced visual language is rooted in spatial thinking and abstract form.
ARTIST LINKS
sabinekelka.com
@zebra_einsnull
Patterns of Perception, 2022. Silkscreen print on various textiles, 150 × 120cm. Series of 6. Produced at SDW, Berlin. Photography: Antonia Hrastar.
