feldfünf Resident: Bethan Hughes
We are pleased to welcome the artist Bethan Hughes as designer in residence in our spaces from February. She studied fine art at the Glasgow School of Art and media art and design at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Through animation, installation, text and print, she explores biological forms – sensual, unruly and ephemeral – that are transformed by technological, commercial and industrial processing. From 2019-2020 she was BS Projects Fellow in Braunschweig and in 2021 she will take part in the renowned Goldrausch-Künstlerinnenprogramm in Berlin. The feldfünf residency gives designers and artists space to pursue their projects. Our projects are available for open processes and experiments.
Hevea
During her workplace scholarship, Bethan Hughes will use our project spaces at feldfünf e.V. to produce a new series of works as part of the ongoing project Hevea. In it, she has been investigating the use of natural rubber since early 2020. Scientific and archival research shows how closely this plant substance is intertwined with humans in the rise of capitalism, modernity and imperialism. Here, the long arm of colonial exploitation, technological innovation and the acceleration of the international rubber trade intersect with botany. Her experimental animations, as well as two- and three-dimensional artefacts, draw on broad narratives about how humans shape and are shaped by the world and its non-human actors.