With Croatian and Samoan grandparents on her father's side and Irish-Australian on her mother's, Alicia Frankovich likes the idea of uprooting herself and going to the other side of the world.
The New Zealand-born artist has been working in Berlin for the best part of the past two years, and returns there on a year-long Creative New Zealand Visual Artists Residency in August.
But for now she's enjoying being back in New Zealand and in Dunedin for the first time.
She's spent the past six weeks working on a Dunedin Public Art Gallery visiting artist's project, "Effigies".
Frankovich (29) is one of several young New Zealand-born artists working globally.
Her international career was kick-started by a programme at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in Melbourne in 2005 and 2006.
She went to Australia after graduating from AUT in 2002.
Her mother is Australian, there are more opportunities in art there, more exhibition spaces - and she wanted to travel, she explains.
"It was a two-year studio programme with 16 local artists and they had visiting international curators coming in every few weeks.
"From that I met a curator who put me into the Busan Biennale in South Korea, and also two young Italian curators who put me in an exhibition in Milan which then developed into getting a number of other opportunities," she says.
In 2007 she studied with Joan Jonas at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti at Lake Como, Italy, with other emerging artists from around the world.
Living and exhibiting in Italy made her want to spend more time in Europe.
She is captivated by the traces left on the landscape and buildings by thousands of years of human habitation, something you don't find here, she says.
"I found it quite shocking. Every time I go back I feel really at home over there.
"I don't know if it's because my grandfather was Croatian, there's some sort of vibe that's close to the Italian."
Although mainly based in Europe, she has recently exhibited in Melbourne and Auckland.
Now she is looking forward to the Berlin residency and the opportunities that may lead from it.
"It's one of the biggest art centres in the world. You can see some of the most important exhibitions every week popping up.
"You really have so much material."
Artists from all over the world are attracted to Berlin because it is the most affordable city in Europe to live in, she says "There's a huge amount of contemporary art. It's got an energy about it.
"The residency for me will be amazing because it will be a big studio complex.
"The last two years I've been more roughing it.
"This will bring exposure and visibility in an international framework, and allow for more production and storage."
Her installation at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery is informed, like previous works, by her childhood training as a gymnast.
"The discipline of that, the ideas of risk and failure all come out of that I guess, and now I call it like a vocabulary in my work.
I wouldn't say that I make my works in any way about gymnastics but there's certainly the sense of the body being in flight, the movements, the elegance - it's like an undercurrent in my work now, sort of ever-present but not necessarily the main idea," she said.
Earlier this year she had vegetable plants suspended by climbers' harnesses growing upside down in the gallery for her installation "Medea" in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne.
Last year at Artspace in Auckland, her performance and video works for "plane for behavers" involved people interacting in pairs or groups, some suspended precariously on chairs.
More recently she says she has been interested in figurative sculpture, although a glance around her installation in the Dunedin gallery reveals no actual figures.
"You have this idea of the frame and body, ways of conjuring a figure that aren't so literal, so everything has a human presence, this energy, this aliveness," she explains.
She indicates items in the exhibition, a metal door frame with a tray of eggs teetering on top, suspended light tubes in a T-shirt which is hung in midair, a cornucopia of spoons collected in Berlin which could be like an internal organ of the body, even a wall that breathes with a hiss as you walk past - they reference the body but not literally, she says.
In the exhibition she also explores ideas about public spaces.
The gallery operates like a public square with monuments, she says.
Inspired by the Octagon and the long-gone Star fountain, she has created a large shallow black pool of water, a scale model of half the Octagon.
Suspended chains, drips of water, the cluster of brass spoons, like viscera, hang above the reflecting pool.
"Where there might have been concrete in the public square, that's been removed and it's just a shell with water.
"I'm taking things away and leaving skeletal representations.
"The critique of rigidity and of the monumental is in the replacement of say, water for concrete and the T-shirt and the light for bones and flesh."
See it
"Effigies" a project by Alicia Frankovich, is at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery until September 19.
