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Residency Periods: 3/2/26-3/3/26 and 6/5/26-3/6/26

Bettina Seitz works across sculpture, installation, and collaborative film projects using a wide range of materials and processes. Her current practice centres around temporary, site-responsive sculpture installations in the landscape. Tracing histories of human presence in remote and uninhabited places off the west coast of Ireland, she looks at our history, mythology and migration as an integral part of the human experience. Life-size sculptures for the installations are created through casting processes with life models using natural materials including carnauba wax, bees wax and cotton fabrics. The resulting hollow sculptural forms resonate a human presence and absence at the same time, evoking associations with the past, our ancestors and otherness, while making enquiries into our entanglement and interconnectedness with the natural, more-than-human, and invisible world and the thin boundaries between them. Collaborating with videographers and sound designers Seitz creates short films with the temporary site-responsive sculpture installations filmed on location over a number of days, resulting in projects including ‘Monk’ (2024), filmed on Inishmurray Island, and ‘Underwave’, a solo exhibition at The Complex in Dublin in 2024, which showed sculpture installations and films of sculptures temporarily installed underwater in Sligo Inner Bay, curated by the Centre for Creative Practices as part of their program to show work of artists with culturally diverse backgrounds.

Bettina Seitz, film still Monk, 2024, HD digital film 2.35:1, duration 22 min 42 sec, filmed on Inishmurray Island with temporary, site-responsive sculpture installations in bees wax, cotton fabric and cinnamon, videography by Peter Martin & Fionn Rogers and sound design by Joe Hunt, produced by Tread Softly, supported through an Arts Council Commissions Award and GoFundMe.
Bettina Seitz, film still Monk, 2024, HD digital film 2.35:1, duration 22 min 42 sec, filmed on Inishmurray Island with temporary, site-responsive sculpture installations in bees wax, cotton fabric and cinnamon, videography by Peter Martin & Fionn Rogers and sound design by Joe Hunt, produced by Tread Softly, supported through an Arts Council Commissions Award and GoFundMe.
Bettina Seitz, film still Monk, 2024, HD digital film 2.35:1, duration 22 min 42 sec, filmed on Inishmurray Island with temporary, site-responsive sculpture installations in bees wax, cotton fabric and cinnamon, videography by Peter Martin & Fionn Rogers and sound design by Joe Hunt, produced by Tread Softly, supported through an Arts Council Commissions Award and GoFundMe.
Bettina Seitz, film still Monk, 2024, HD digital film 2.35:1, duration 22 min 42 sec, filmed on Inishmurray Island with temporary, site-responsive sculpture installations in bees wax, cotton fabric and cinnamon, videography by Peter Martin & Fionn Rogers and sound design by Joe Hunt, produced by Tread Softly, supported through an Arts Council Commissions Award and GoFundMe.
Bettina Seitz, exhibition view Underwave, The Complex, Dublin, 2024, 5 suspended sculptures and 7 floor based sculptures in Carnauba wax, cotton blankets, fishing net and buoys and single screen HD digital film projection of the sculptures filmed underwater in Sligo Inner Bay, total duration of 4 short films 5 min 36 sec, exhibition produced by the Centre for Creative Practices, ‘Underwave’ films originally commissioned by Tread Softly in 2020, supported by the Arts Council and Creative Ireland, photo by Kate-Bowe O’Brien.
Bettina Seitz, exhibition view Underwave, The Complex, Dublin, 2024, 5 suspended sculptures and 7 floor based sculptures in Carnauba wax, cotton blankets, fishing net and buoys and single screen HD digital film projection of the sculptures filmed underwater in Sligo Inner Bay, total duration of 4 short films 5 min 36 sec, exhibition produced by the Centre for Creative Practices, ‘Underwave’ films originally commissioned by Tread Softly in 2020, supported by the Arts Council and Creative Ireland, photo by Kate-Bowe O’Brien.
Bettina Seitz, exhibition view Underwave, The Complex, Dublin, 2024, 5 suspended sculptures and 7 floor based sculptures in Carnauba wax, cotton blankets, fishing net and buoys and single screen HD digital film projection of the sculptures filmed underwater in Sligo Inner Bay, total duration of 4 short films 5 min 36 sec, exhibition produced by the Centre for Creative Practices, ‘Underwave’ films originally commissioned by Tread Softly in 2020, supported by the Arts Council and Creative Ireland, photo by Kate-Bowe O’Brien.
Bettina Seitz, exhibition view Underwave, The Complex, Dublin, 2024, 5 suspended sculptures and 7 floor based sculptures in Carnauba wax, cotton blankets, fishing net and buoys and single screen HD digital film projection of the sculptures filmed underwater in Sligo Inner Bay, total duration of 4 short films 5 min 36 sec, exhibition produced by the Centre for Creative Practices, ‘Underwave’ films originally commissioned by Tread Softly in 2020, supported by the Arts Council and Creative Ireland, photo by Kate-Bowe O’Brien.

Bettina Seitz is a German-born visual artist living and working in County Leitrim and Sligo. Seitz studied sculpture at the Freie Kunstakademie, Nürtingen, Germany and received a BA in Fine Art Sculpture (First Class Honours) from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, Italy in 1993. Returning to Ireland she co-founded independent artists’ studios Area 4 Art in Sligo in 1994. Since 2020 she has worked as a part-time assistant lecturer in Fine Art 3D Studies at ATU Sligo. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally with many public and private art commissions and sculptures in private and public collections in Ireland and abroad.

Recent projects include ‘Underwave’ at The Complex, Dublin (2024); ‘Monk’ for Tread Softly 2024, Sligo; ‘Ancestors’, broadcast by Tread Softly and RTE (2021); ‘Underwave’, broadcast by Tread Softly (2020); Public Art Commission for European Capital of Volunteering, Doorly Park, Sligo, PPN and Sligo County Council (2018); ‘Ghosts’, The Model & offsite, Sligo (2016); ‘A Trembling Veil’, with Patrick Hall & Nick Miller, Belgravia Gallery, London (2015), Volta Awards for DIFF (Dublin International Film Festival-annually 2007-2025).

Awards include Arts Council of Ireland Commissions Award (for Monk, 2023), Platform 31 (Association of Local Authority Arts Offices (ALAAO) with the Arts Council of Ireland, 2022), Arts Council of Ireland Agility Awards (2021, 2022, 2023), Individual Artist Bursary, Leitrim County Council (2021, 2023 & 2025), Creative Ireland, Open Call Sligo (2021 & 2019), Arts Council of Ireland Professional Development Award (2020), Sligo County Council Centenary Programme of Events (2016), Culture Ireland (2015). Residencies include Tyrone Guthrie Centre (2022), SIM, Reykjavik, Island (2007) and Cill Rialaig (2004).

Current Residencies