ArtMeant* Project

Helen Eugster, a Zurich-based artist, explores the concept of “negative form” through sculpture and installation. In her bronze works, she makes bodily traces visible through absence, addressing themes such as holding on, loss, and fragility. In the Watershed series, she materializes the invisible the air around the eye proposing a threshold where individual and collective experiences intersect.

We conducted a short video interview with the artist about these works. You can watch the video on our Instagram account.

You can find more detailed information about the works below, through the artist’s own texts:

“The bronze sculptures are negative forms of a part of the body or of an action, specifically, the material displaced by the pressure of hands and feet.

On the one hand, in Squeezing through my fingers, I attempted to hold and compress warm modeling wax with my hands. However, this “grasping” caused the wax to slip through my fingers. The impressions created in this process symbolically represent the desire to hold on, the necessity of letting go, and ultimately, loss.

Pressing through my toes, on the other hand, was created from a small puddle of melted wax into which I stepped with my toes spread apart. The impressions pressed through the gaps between the toes are central here. Associations such as “sinking deep” or “standing on slippery, unstable ground” may also be evoked.

In both concepts, situations or things that slip away from us in life, things that run through our fingers or toes, are materialized.

Using the lost-wax casting process, the wax models were then translated into bronze. Bronze greatly elevates the forms, through which I assign a high value to failure and to life experience.”

“Watershed consists of a cast eye socket presented in four different versions. Initially made from skin-friendly silicone, this impression was later translated into wax and subsequently into a bronze casting. In a sense, it depicts a mountain peak, a watershed that does not truly exist, as the airless space within the eye socket is materialized.

Watershed takes up the theme of crying as a deeply human characteristic. The title suggests a tipping point, a watershed, by associating crying with far-reaching decisions, grief, and happiness where a drop of water, or a tear, can metaphorically flow to one side or the other. The suspended macro photographs also evoke landscape photography, intertwining the themes of individual fate and world events, as well as the micro and macro realms.”

Who is Helen Eugster?

Helen Eugster, born in 1986 and raised bilingual in Spanish and German, lives and works near Zurich, Switzerland, with her two sons (17 and 15). She holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Zurich University of the Arts and a Master’s degree in Secondary Education from the Zurich University of Teacher Education. In her artistic practice, she works mainly with the media of installation and sculture.

“My artistic practice is strongly driven by the fascination with the ambiguity of symbols, words, and images. Through installation and sculptural work, I often explore a shift from one dimension to another. In doing so, the chosen materiality often plays a crucial role. I always try to focus on areas where the literal and the symbolic, the signifié and the signifiant, matter and language, or action, object, and subject seem to overlap or intertwine with each other.”