ULI & THOMAS WESTPHAL

Uli Westphal is a Berlin-based visual artist whose work examines how humans perceive and transform the natural world, especially through food systems. Blending photography, installation, and participatory projects, his practice combines scientific observation with poetic inquiry.

Grounded in long-term research, projects like The Cultivar Series and Transplantation explore the tension between biodiversity and industrial standardization, inviting reflection on our evolving relationship with nature.

Westphal studied in Berlin and the Netherlands, earning a Master’s degree in Art in Context from the Universität der Künste Berlin and a BFA from the Academy for Fine Arts and Design in Enschede. His work has been shown internationally, including at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Museum Brot und Kunst, and the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam.

Thomas Westphal is a German visual artist based in Helsinki whose work explores the dynamics of perception, memory, and spatial experience through installation, photography, and video. His practice often reflects on the interplay between architecture, urban space, and human presence, drawing attention to subtle shifts in atmosphere and form.

Westphal studied at the Academy for Art & Design in Enschede, the Netherlands, and holds an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of Kiasma – Museum of Contemporary Art, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, and the Finnish National Gallery.

Check out more of Uli and Thomas' creative work:

🌐 https://www.uliwestphal.de/

🌐 https://www.thomaswestphal.net

Unless stated otherwise, all artwork and photos in this article: © Uli & Thomas Westphal

From left to right: Thomas and Uli Westphal

How does the ocean inspire you art?

Thomas: Creating a work of art is a fluid process, demanding flexibility and fueled by randomness. All this is a given property of water — a constant change, an unstoppable motion, unique in its persistence and never repeating.

I remember, in my childhood summers, sitting for hours on a Dutch beach, watching the waves come rolling in, trying to predict the next big one. In my artistic work, I have experienced big waves rolling in and others just flattening out, absorbed by unknown factors. It never stopped my expectation, though — I am bound to the rhythm.

Uli: As kids, our mother and grandmother used to read us stories of Homer's Odyssey, Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki, and Jacques Cousteu's Calypso. The ocean has always been a place of mystery, awe and wonder — something that triggers the imagination. Seafarer tales have always fascinated me.

I have collected hundreds of depictions of sea monsters found on maritime maps. I like them because they put humans in their place. Early on in my practice, I did quite a few works based on sea monsters. For example, I built a surfboard in the shape of a giant sepia, based on the possible existence of a giant inkfish inhabiting the deep sea.

Do you have a personal or first experience with the ocean that shaped your art?

Uli: In 2004, I was given the rare chance to snorkel at the Galápagos Archipelago. I stayed in the water until the onset of hypothermia, hypnotized by the abundance of creatures still living there. It was a brief glimpse into a lost world. The experience of a pristine ecosystem — its biodiversity and evolution — was transformative for my practice. Since then, I've had this recurring dream: looking from above, usually a cliff, onto a water surface teeming with life.

I went on to document mainly plants and crop cultivars, but the ocean has always been in the back of my mind. During the Corona pandemic, I bought an old microscope and started sampling water from puddles around my studio in Berlin. There it was again — this view from above onto an ecosystem teeming with life in myriads of shapes and forms. It had been around me all along; I just wasn't able to see it before. A lot of my practice is about making things visible, and this put me on a new path.

Thomas: One day, I was sitting at the shore with my smartphone, playing with an augmented language app, and directed the phone's camera to the sea. The evening sun was shining, and the wind was rippling the surface of the water. There was an unusual contrast that day between the tops and valleys of the waves. Suddenly, the program was trying to read meaning into the random noise of the waves, and words popped up on the display. The oracle-like messages in the water mesmerized me for hours.

As I understood, the program ran the image through a filter to remove shadows. Text is sharp, so it removes whatever is not sharp and makes the image black and white to help figure out where letters are. The unpredictable game was on, and it kept on talking to me. I tried to recreate the event in several installations, but it never occurred again. To this day, I collect wave footage of water surfaces, trying to find this moment of magical connection.

Tell us about a piece of art you created inspired by the ocean.

Thomas: During my study at the AKI, Academy of Fine Arts, I installed a public artwork in the town of Meppel in the western Netherlands. The artificial canals running through the town, called 'Grachten', were no longer shipable, and the city wanted artworks that referred to their former origin and to water as a moving element.

My chosen location had no name on the map, so I decided to install a 16-metre-long lettering reading 'Panta rhei' — ancient Greek for 'everything flows'. The size is related to the street name size on a city map and carries the idea that we exist in a field or continuum in which everything is constantly in flux or process.

Uli: I was always fascinated by scale drawings of small divers next to whales found in natural history books. So I extrapolated the size of the whale from one of these drawings — a blue whale — and created a life-sized model of its body volume. The sculpture was made from plastic foil that I pulled out of a dumpster from a company that manufactured inlays for liquid storage tanks. I welded its individual segments together in a tiny room, and it was not until I inflated the volume with air in a large gym hall that I could grasp the full scale of it. The work gave me an understanding for the magnificence of these animals.

In your opinion, why is it important to protect marine spaces?

Thomas: I am living in Vuosaari, Finland, next to a natural sand beach. I wake up and go to bed with a view of the sea and the horizon. I celebrate it during a swim on warm summer nights and in winter by dipping into an ice hole. The sea erodes, it carries along, it forces us to reflect on ourselves. The sea consumes, and it also nourishes. When its water is polluted, it terrifies us and reminds us of our own mortality.

Over the last 15 years living at the seashore, I have been a witness to the constant deterioration of water quality in the Baltic. It's not only the general pollution and occasional wastewater spills, but the constant rise of blue algae. And f*** those rentable jet-skis.

The peace I feel when staring at the horizon is coupled with the insight that there should be emptiness out there — a common commitment not to occupy every last corner within our periphery, but just the length of a healthy swim. Maybe that is a good approach: the golden rule. You can't own anything between a healthy swimming distance and what lies behind the horizon.

Uli: Despite almost half of humanity living near it, for many the sea is an unknown, inaccessible world. We can't breathe underwater, so we are seldom witness to what is happening here. That makes marine spaces especially vulnerable to environmental degradation. Yet the sea is essential for the well being of our planet. Projects like Imagining Godzilla, can help bring attention to sea.

What can art bring to the conversation in marine protection

Thomas: In our last exhibition in Helsinki at the Muu Media Art Festival, we showed our collaborative work “City of Gods and Mad Men”, which combined the human, binary and microbiological realms. The city was a street map of Helsinki printed on microfilm and coated with samples of harbour water under a microscope. The activity of seawater microorganisms in the sample was observed and analyzed by an algorithm that activated a set of robotic machinery around a central pool, creating currents and adding oxygen to the water. Both worlds were unaware of their entanglement. The viewer was able to navigate the city by turning knobs on the microscope stage. By adding a street map to the microcosm, this alien world suddenly became relatable and familiar in human terms.

Uli: In September, we will present a new work at the “Offside Signal” exhibition in Vaasa. It consists of two tidal pools in acrylic incubation chambers, each with rubber glove openings that visitors can use to submerge their hands into the water. The aquariums are connected with a thin silicon hose that passes through a special microscope slide called a flow chamber. The microscopic view will be relayed as a giant projection onto the walls of the exhibition space.

Using the principle of communicating vessels, the viewer can control the flow of particles and creatures in the microscope slide by altering the water levels by submerging their hands. Minute and gentle control of hand movements will be necessary to create an equilibrium between the vessels and to keep the microscopic view still enough to observe. The work creates a portal between both worlds, enabling viewers to understand themselves as active agents in this environment. We believe that bridging the divide between human and "nature", land and water, macro- and microcosm, is essential for marine conservation, because it creates awareness of these hidden worlds.