Sabrina Barbieri is an artist from Switzerland with Italian origins. After a year abroad in Bellingham Washington State at a college where she was introduced to print making for the first time, she started at the swiss art school Zürcher Hochschule der Künste right after. She finished her Master in Art Education in 2016 and has been working as an art teacher ever since. Besides teaching her own art practice always took up an important part of her life. She describes her residency in TYPA:
I came to TYPA with the idea to continue working on my long term project about algae. I used to do competition swimming and therefore most of my works connect in some way to the topic of water. I brought copper plates and had already some ideas on what to work on. Soon after having the introduction to TYPA with its facilities and all the people with their expertise of letter press print making or other printing techniques, I felt like I had too little time already. Therefore, I spent my month of residency on one hand proceeding with my copper prints on algae and on the other hand with trying out collography, lino cut, letterpress and making paper. All these techniques I kept combining with the topic of algae, which broadened my view on the topic itself as well. For instance, I made algae paper in little square shapes,which was shown as part of an exhibition right after my return back home and connected to other pieces I had made about the topic of soil. While being in Tartu I could also visit the algae herbarium at the botanical garden and look through their piles of dried algae of which some were dated back to the 18th century.
I met a lot of great people in Tartu and got to visit and spend time in many different places. Since in the topic of algae, I couldn‘t really include all these experiences of Tartu as a place itself, I had the urge to start a new project, which contained one tetra pack print a day of my residency in Tartu. The tiny prints of 5 x 10 cm to me are like a diary of places I spent time at in Tartu: the studio, the desk at the apartment, the river side, the cross-country slopes, the BJJ sporting hall, and so on. Since TYPA had its anniversary while I was there and lot of workshops were organized, I took my tetra pack prints as a starting point for a workshop on that technique.
Some of my algae prints developed during my residency are shown in November 2022 at the swiss print making exhibition IMPRESSION in Grenchen.
