At the school, Seth was able to familiarise themself with the tools and working methods used in stone carving in order to integrate the material stone conceptually and physically into their own creative process. At the Jakob Bengel industrial monument, Seth explored the levels of meaning of symbols in the past and present. The photos presented here show Seth in the workshops at the university and at Jakob Bengel as well as a selection of intermediate stages of the pieces worked on here.
Seth says about their time in Idar-Oberstein:
I arrived at the Gemstone and Jewelery Department with the plan to complete a few new pieces for my most recent body of work, Ligare. Carving acorns and a broken heart alowed me to gain comfort with the tools and equipment, and become familiar with stone as a varied and colaborative material. Working in a subtractive method to reveal form, with a hard and somewhat unforgiving material, requires intense mental and physical focus. The intimacy and solitary nature of this process, and the unveiling of form, align nicely with my next research focus —the construction of gender identity. I am taking many things back to my studio: carved forms, pieces of stone, generative knowledge, and most importantly, inspiration.
The Jakob Bengel factory is an incredibly beautiful and intense place — saturated with history, remnants of high energy production, and an almost tangible sense of the laborers who worked in the space for decades. I entered the place with my most current body of work, Ligare, present in my mind. The work considers the meaningful agency of jewelry and how this meaning has been forgotten in the commercialization of powerful symbols into consumable jewelry. I spent hours looking through the thousands of stamp forms in hopes of finding some of these symbols, and not surprisingly, found many. How could I use these remnants of the past as inspiration for something new? I may have found the answer in experiments I undertook using a new material, created from sheets of recycled plastic by my friend and artist Maria Phi lips, that I brought with me. The idea of recycling, of reusing something, connected with the use of these stamps and forms, remnants of the past. Pressing into the plastic, something new emerged from a historical tool and a new, but recycled, material. I look forward to continuing this exploration of embossing meaning into material.
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