Bethan Hughes (*1989, UK) studied Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art and Media Art at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. In 2020, she received a PhD from the University of Leeds for her dissertation “Against Immateriality: 3D CGI and Contemporary Art”. Her work has recently been shown in solo exhibitions at Centrum Berlin and HAUNT/frontviews, Berlin, and in the group exhibition “Mutual Matters: Goldrausch” 2021 at the Haubrok Foundation, Berlin. Between 2019-20, she was a Braunschweig Projects fellow and in 2021, she received a fine art research scholarship from the city of Berlin.

During my residency at the Künstlerdorf I worked on new aspects of an ongoing project called Hevea. Through a series of installations that combine research, sculpture, print and text, the project is an attempt to parse the ways in which people, plants, politics and power are intimately connected. This particular act of the project concerns a plant known as the Russian dandelion. Sought after for the high-concentration of natural rubber found in its roots, I trace the story of this humble “weed”, from the Tien Shen mountains in Kazakhstan to the farms in the Soviet Union, greenhouses at Auschwitz to research centres funded by multi-national tyre companies today. Whilst in Schöppingen, I went on several site visits to the Institute of Plant Biology and Biotechnology at the University of Münster, a place where researchers are studying Russian dandelions. The footage I captured there will feed into a film to be completed in 2023 following a research / filming trip to Almaty in Kazakhstan. I also created a new series of works using archival photographs, laser cut steel and rubber which explore the ways in which people and plants come to be entangled within the machinations of politics, war and commerce.