Campus Gestaltung

AiR Seth Papac reflektiert die Künstler*innenresidenz am Campus Idar-Oberstein

Das Artist-in-Residence-Programm (AIR) der Hochschule Trier in Idar-Oberstein bietet Künstler*innen die Möglichkeit, in der inspirierenden Umgebung der Villa Bengel und der Werkstätten der Hochschule Trier – Campus Idar-Oberstein zu arbeiten. Im Juni und Juli 2024 war Seth Papac aus den USA zu Gast.

In der Hochschule konnte Seth die Werkzeuge und Arbeitsweisen, die bei der Steinbearbeitung zum Einsatz kommen, kennenlernen, um das Material Stein konzeptionell wie physisch in den eigenen Schaffensprozess einzufügen. Im Industriedenkmal Jakob Bengel setzte sich Seth mit den Bedeutungsebenen von Symbolen in Vergangeneheit und Gegenwart auseinander. Die hier abgebildeten Fotos zeigen Seth in den Werkstätten der Hochschule und bei Jakob Bengel sowie eine Auswahl an Zwischenschritten der hier bearbeiteten Stücke.

Seth sagt über die Zeit 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 Phillips, 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.

Hier erfahren Sie mehr über das AiR-Programm