PROFILE

Born in Germany, lives and works in Leitrim/Sligo, Ireland.

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 views history, mythology, and migration as an integral part of the human experience. For her installations, she creates life-sized sculptures through casting processes, with life models using such natural materials as carnauba wax, beeswax and cotton fabrics. The resulting hollow sculptural forms simultaneously resonate human presence and absence, evoking associations with the past, our ancestors, and otherness, while enquiring 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 also 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.

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. After returning to Ireland, she co-founded independent artists’ studios Area 4 Art in Sligo in 1994. From 2020 - 2025, she was a part-time assistant lecturer in Fine Art 3D Studies at ATU Sligo.

Her work has been 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, Sligo (2024); 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 (2026-2007).

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 (2023, 2022, 2021), Individual Artist Bursary, Leitrim County Council (2025, 2023 & 2021), Creative Ireland, Open Call Sligo (2025, 2021,2019), Arts Council of Ireland Professional Development Award (2020), Sligo County Council Centenary Programme of Events (2016), Culture Ireland (2015).

Residencies include Technical Development Residency, Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2026), Tyrone Guthrie Centre (2022), SIM, Reykjavik, Island (2007) and Cill Rialaig (2004).