Ursula Landwehr-Traxler is a visual artist and recent graduate of Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art. She was born in Glasgow, 2001, to a German mother and Scottish father and lives and works in Glasgow.
Her working process is centered around an intuitive investigation of material properties. Within this, she is interested in how impressions can be recorded[remembered] through different mediums and environments, looking at displacement, repetition, and the movements of media over time.
The cyclical movements which make up her daily life mean she is constantly covering the same ground, the same routes and pathways. These journeys are archived through her collections; drawing, photographing or picking up forms and materials, which form the framework for her studio practice. The collections she makes become part of her work through repeated drawing, modelling, casting, or printing, where aspects of an object are magnified or reduced in scale. Within these processes, the materials, through their inherent properties, constantly generate new reference points for the work and drive its development in scale and form. For example, her interest in the movements of material between different states, from liquid to solid, i.e in drying clay or hardening wax, has underlined the development of her most recent work.
Repeated processes are a way for her to investigate material memories, exploring how the same movement or form is recorded differently with each attempt, or when using a different material. Working in this way allows her to explore mark-making as an anchor for investigating the memories held by man-made and natural landscapes/environments and the dialogue between place and object/paper and pencil. In this sense the creation of a mark becomes a way of indicating[remembering] the presence of something else.