Graffiti guerillas swap cans for chisels to carve 3D totems

Hendrik Docken is a burly sculptor who lives and works on a mountaintop studio near the German rural town of Oberursel. Loomit, from the bustling metropolis of Munich, is among the first graffiti artists waging guerilla warfare across German cities. When they met, confrontation was expected rather than collaboration - it was a clash between classic provincialism and cutting-edge modernism, perhaps.

'I'm coming from the forest with a chainsaw and he's coming from the city with a spray can,' Docken says about their meeting four years ago. While their meeting sounds like a scene from a movie, the pair's encounter was aimed at producing art through a movement known as schnitzing - carving wood sculptures of graffiti. Schnitzing - from the German word schnitz meaning carving - takes graffiti from inner city walls and into sculpture parks by representing it as totem poles. Rather than paint, graffiti artists use hammers and chisels on their three-dimensional works. 'I have always admired graffiti but I'm a three-dimensional guy, and I don't like the smell of the spray can. So I think there must be a way for me to do graffiti ... differently,' says Docken, who works under the street moniker of Hendoc.

'In art you have to make something very new, something nobody made on this planet before,' he says. 'And this is something I can really say nobody has done. I also did carvings of women standing this or that way but there are 100,000 people who did this before.'

Schnitzing is more than just a choice of aesthetics. It is Docken's attempt to contribute to the German authorities' drive to control the rising amount of scribbling on walls.

Despite his admiration for graffiti, Docken sees tagging - an artist sprays his handle or name across the neighbourhood - as a blight on the city landscape.

'Those going around tagging kills the whole graffiti thing,' says Docken, adding that graffiti in Germany causes Euro500 million ($5 billion) in damage every year, and 600 police officers are assigned to catch graffiti artists at work - a response that is far from successful.