https://szikszeszter.com Eszter Sziksz Sat, 23 Jan 2021 22:29:56 +0000 https://szikszeszter.com en https://szikszeszter.com/research Sat, 23 Jan 2021 22:29:56 +0000 Eszter Sziksz https://szikszeszter.com/research <img width="3024" height="1278" width_o="3024" height_o="1278" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2e0335307ca7cad73ea085adfa5d826c0a9a538384f99a9d1541efb10f3e0811/11.jpg" data-mid="251884206" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2e0335307ca7cad73ea085adfa5d826c0a9a538384f99a9d1541efb10f3e0811/11.jpg" /> <img width="5712" height="2309" width_o="5712" height_o="2309" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0135b9c726f946e6458b626588fbb5d8a2d0882548fe95677915e2d752bc81a/IMG_0595-2-copy.jpg" data-mid="251845680" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d0135b9c726f946e6458b626588fbb5d8a2d0882548fe95677915e2d752bc81a/IMG_0595-2-copy.jpg" /> <img width="5712" height="2310" width_o="5712" height_o="2310" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/288ceb58df6c42d56af98068ac4f92f89a6b13939b0f405085b5e6327f7b3846/w.jpg" data-mid="252250186" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/288ceb58df6c42d56af98068ac4f92f89a6b13939b0f405085b5e6327f7b3846/w.jpg" /> <img width="5712" height="2310" width_o="5712" height_o="2310" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0307ace7f9dc44d21f1d7475b9764ccaa06f0d4f6e258b4b18210e3510fa17f/w9.jpg" data-mid="252250536" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d0307ace7f9dc44d21f1d7475b9764ccaa06f0d4f6e258b4b18210e3510fa17f/w9.jpg" /> <img width="5712" height="2310" width_o="5712" height_o="2310" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/97abde8a698e071ac138185a245cc63004749bd406b6e9b15ec5f443f898e57d/w8.jpg" data-mid="252250535" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/97abde8a698e071ac138185a245cc63004749bd406b6e9b15ec5f443f898e57d/w8.jpg" /> <img width="5712" height="2310" width_o="5712" height_o="2310" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7d4034101d81f1eff0775fc400be6330d37980b3b617b405444d8893f02f2834/W7.jpg" data-mid="252250512" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7d4034101d81f1eff0775fc400be6330d37980b3b617b405444d8893f02f2834/W7.jpg" /> <img width="5712" height="2310" width_o="5712" height_o="2310" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f9ca6c8388ef78fda5add43c8c6ab8e2252f729a91e26e1f1c30ce0c7e40be26/W6.jpg" data-mid="252250511" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f9ca6c8388ef78fda5add43c8c6ab8e2252f729a91e26e1f1c30ce0c7e40be26/W6.jpg" /> <img width="5712" height="2310" width_o="5712" height_o="2310" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6c313b4949b1e21d2b431f6d93a389b19eb19a766a5cc62daa0e792eac889641/w4.jpg" data-mid="252250487" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6c313b4949b1e21d2b431f6d93a389b19eb19a766a5cc62daa0e792eac889641/w4.jpg" /> RESEARCH The Unstable Print: Material, Time, and the Ephemeral ImageMy practice has developed from a traditional understanding of printmaking as a process of reproduction toward an increasingly experimental investigation of what a printed image can become. While I deeply value the history and discipline of traditional printmaking, I have become less interested in the idea of the print as a master image that produces multiple stable impressions. I am more interested in what materials, processes, movement, and time can add to the meaning of an image. For me, the material is not simply a surface on which an image is placed. It is part of the meaning of the work. I ask what happens when the material changes the image, when the image changes the material, and when the conditions surrounding the print become part of the work itself. This has led me toward fragile, unstable, and time-based materials and toward forms that extend printmaking into moving image, virtual reality, installation, and other forms of expanded media. I am interested in pushing the boundaries of what can be considered a print while remaining grounded in the fundamental relationship between image, impression, material, and trace. My work explores the ephemeral, the shifting material life of a print as it emerges, transforms, decays, and leaves traces of memory. I am drawn to the moment when an image is still present but already beginning to disappear, when the act of preserving something becomes inseparable from its loss. Through experimental printmaking, I engage in a personal ritual of remembrance, creating encounters between image, material, body, environment, and time. Fragile materials, ice, ash, sand, water, snow, loose paper, and ephemeral surfaces, have become part of my visual language. I use them because they resist the permanence traditionally associated with the printed image. They change as they are touched, warmed, cooled, exposed to air, moved by wind, or simply left to time. In these transformations, I find a way to speak about experiences that cannot be held still: moments, feelings, histories, and the delicate traces they leave behind. This represents a departure from the traditional printmaking paradigm of permanent reproduction on a static sheet of paper. Rather than treating the print as an object to own or preserve unchanged, I approach it as a temporary vessel for an encounter. The image exists within a duration. It emerges, shifts, moves, fragments, and disappears, asking the viewer to remain present to the process rather than arrive only at its conclusion. This approach can take many forms. When ink is screenprinted onto ice, for example, the matrix becomes part of the image. As warmth enters the ice, it begins to melt; ink slips, bleeds, disperses, and travels with the water. The boundary between image and substrate becomes uncertain. What initially appears to be destruction becomes another form of inscription. The melting print records its own disappearance. Ice also carries a significance beyond its material behavior. In my work, it becomes a place where memory, landscape, and time converge. Its transformation evokes the vulnerability of landscapes that are themselves changing and disappearing, while also recalling the instability of personal memory. The image held in ice cannot remain unchanged any more than a memory can. Both preserve traces while continually altering what they preserve. My investigation also extends to thermochromic surfaces, where the image begins in darkness rather than visibility. A printed portrait or text remains concealed beneath a heat-sensitive surface until the warmth of a human hand or body causes the image to emerge. The viewer cannot access the image through sight alone. Physical presence is required. I am particularly interested in this process when working with suppressed or painful histories, including portraits of children whose lives have been marked by historical trauma. In these works, touch becomes a gesture of remembrance. The image appears because someone has come close enough to warm it. When contact ends, the surface cools and the image gradually returns to darkness. I think of this disappearance not as a simple erasure, but as another state of presence. The image has been seen, encountered, and carried away by the viewer, even though it can no longer be seen on the surface. Other experiments move the printed image further into the environment. I am interested in printing onto loose materials such as sand and snow, where the image is never completely separated from the conditions around it. Wind can disturb the printed surface, pick up particles, scatter them, and carry the image away. In this situation, the environment becomes an active participant in the print. The image is not simply displayed within a landscape; it enters into a physical relationship with it. Printing on snow similarly creates an image whose existence depends upon temperature and weather. The print may gradually melt, shift, or disappear into the landscape. The resulting work is not only an image but an event, a temporary encounter between ink, material, environment, and time. I am also interested in the instability created by printing on the edges of loosely stacked sheets of paper. Rather than printing onto a single stable surface, the image is distributed across individual pieces whose movement causes the image to separate, shift, or appear to fall apart. The physical structure of the print becomes a metaphor for fragmentation, instability, and the gradual disintegration of memory. What appears to be a single image is revealed to be dependent upon many separate and vulnerable parts. My interest in moving image and virtual reality grows from this same desire to extend the print beyond a static two-dimensional frame. I am interested in what happens when an image is given duration, when it can melt, move, disappear, return, or transform in front of the viewer. A still print can contain a moment, but a time-based image can tell a different kind of story. The unfolding of an image allows disappearance itself to become part of its narrative. Virtual reality and other forms of expanded media offer another way of questioning the boundaries of print. I am interested in carrying the language of the printed image into spaces where the viewer can move through, encounter, or inhabit the image rather than simply look at it. These technologies are not an end in themselves. I use them when they allow the material and conceptual concerns of printmaking to move into another dimension and create a new meaning. Across these experiments, I am not interested in using unusual materials simply for their novelty. The material must contribute something that a conventional printed surface cannot communicate. Ice allows an image to melt. Heat allows a hidden image to appear through touch. Sand and snow allow the environment to participate in the destruction and dispersal of the image. Loose paper allows an image to fragment and fall apart. Moving image allows disappearance to unfold through time. Virtual reality allows the viewer to enter a spatial relationship with the image. In each case, the material condition becomes inseparable from the meaning of the work. My practice therefore moves between freezing and warming, concealment and revelation, stability and fragmentation, presence and disappearance. These are not separate investigations but different manifestations of the same question: what can a print communicate when it is allowed to change? I am interested in the possibility that disappearance itself can become a form of preservation. A print does not necessarily preserve by remaining unchanged. It can preserve through the trace it leaves in the body, in memory, in water, in the altered surface, in the movement of material, or in the experience of having witnessed it disappear. Ultimately, I see experimental printmaking as a way of expanding the meaning of the printed image rather than abandoning printmaking itself. My interest is not in moving away from print, but in asking how far its language can travel. I want to continue exploring materials, technologies, environments, and time-based processes that allow the print to become something more than a permanent object. The ephemeral print is not a failed permanent object; it is a different kind of record, one that preserves through transformation, and holds space for what cannot remain fixed. https://szikszeszter.com/home Sat, 23 Jan 2021 21:02:39 +0000 Eszter Sziksz https://szikszeszter.com/home Eszter Sziksz About Work CV ︎ Contact Research&nbsp; My work explores the ephemeron — the shifting material states of a piece as it emerges, transforms, decays, and leaves traces of memory. Through experimental printmaking, I engage in a personal ritual that becomes a form of remembrance, creating psychic imprints that invite intimate, sentient engagement. Fragile materials, ice, ash, sand, ephemeral surfaces, become my language for exploring presence, absence, loss, and connection. These works are gestures toward preserving what cannot be fixed: moments, feelings, histories, and the delicate traces they leave behind. Whether through transforming hidden portraits in participatory projects, printing onto melting ice as a meditation on memory and impermanence, or releasing ephemeral inscriptions into the landscape, my practice traces a path between personal remembrance and collective experience. For me, the print is not an object to own, but a vessel for a shared, transient encounter where disappearance itself becomes a quiet form of preservation and a testament to the beauty of what passes away..
 News:&nbsp;TRACES OF CHANGE: MARK MAKING, TEXT, AND (SOCIAL) PROGRESS? Eszter Sziksz: Let It Go | Gallery114@HCC YB Life/Work/Fun at the Arctic Upcoming residency at the Arctic, &nbsp;2023 October TAC ︎︎︎Portfolio&nbsp; Press releases &nbsp; ︎︎︎Art in Print Magazine, cover feature ︎︎︎Prix de Print 28. Award, publication ︎︎︎IceHotel installtion &nbsp;featured in Inhabitat ©Eszter SzikszInstagram &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; https://szikszeszter.com/About Tue, 05 Jan 2021 13:25:26 +0000 Eszter Sziksz https://szikszeszter.com/About ︎ Eszter Sziksz Bio&nbsp; Eszter Sziksz is a Hungarian artist whose work brings together printmaking, installation, sculpture, and video to explore memory, presence, and human connection. Many of her projects invite participation from the audience, allowing the work to unfold through physical interaction and shared experience. She has lived and worked internationally, with projects spanning Europe, Asia, and the United States. Her work has been featured in exhibitions such as Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration at the Sarasota Art Museum, the&nbsp;International Print Triennial&nbsp;in Poland, the&nbsp;Boston Printmakers North American Print Biennial, juried by Elizabeth Rudy of the Harvard Art Museums, and the upcoming Human/Nature: Envisioning the Environment at the Castellani Art Museum&nbsp;(2026–27). In fall 2026 she will present her first museum-level solo exhibition at the Sarasota Art Museum. She is the recipient of the Halo Arts Project Fellowship&nbsp;(2026), a&nbsp;Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant(2024), and a&nbsp;Puffin Foundation Grant&nbsp;(2023), and received the Prix de Print Award from Art in Print magazine, where her work was featured on the cover. Eszter earned her MFA from Memphis College of Art and her Doctorate in Liberal Arts (DLA) from the University of Pécs, Hungary. She teaches Fine Arts/Printmaking at Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, Florida. <img width="894" height="530" width_o="894" height_o="530" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3d67ab6b2734ac4e6f8878f176d3dc1113e1a54d961f9fec01ca0537936981ad/web1.jpg" data-mid="94020538" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/894/i/3d67ab6b2734ac4e6f8878f176d3dc1113e1a54d961f9fec01ca0537936981ad/web1.jpg" /> ︎︎︎back to the main page ©Instagram &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;