Beatrice Oettinger’s hairy dresses

CHERRRYBOy Magazine — Optigram

Courtesy of Beatrice Oettinger

I met Beatrice Oettinger on an afternoon in August. Upon arriving at her studio in Berlin we introduced ourselves, and she gave me the opportunity to have a look around while she made some tea. The album Silent Movies by Marc Ribot accompanied our movements, streaks of light gleamed through the window, softly swaying to the motion of the leaves in the wind, illuminating the natural pastel colours of the clothes I was running through my fingers.

Despite being surrounded by dead or dying plants, the studio seemed to carry a life of its own.

The walls were lined with railings, boxes, and cupboards labelled and organized into categories such as seeds, flowers, and leaves. A few of her Baked Dresses were hanging in the window, small prototypes, or experiments, that helped build an understanding of, and a relationship to, the plants she collected, in order to identify the best way to incorporate them into her designs.

When the tea was ready, Beatrice came out of the kitchen, and we sat down at her worktable and started from the beginning. She grew up in Bavaria, both Munich and the countryside, where she still commutes to frequently, to the point where she claims that her current life is very much split in-between Berlin and Bavaria, two drastically different environments. The main reason for her frequent visits to Bavaria was to take care of her late father, who was struggling with sickness for 2–3 years prior. While this unfortunate circumstance led Beatrice to take a hiatus from her work, she was able to reconnect with her childhood environment, and now hopes to spark projects and creative expression within the community.

Her work primarily deals with her search for liveliness, as well as with herself within modern society.

Liveliness not only in terms of vitality but also warmth and respect, almost love. Love when dealing with surroundings, nature, other humans. She feels as though she was never taught how to be ‘alive’ and is now striving to teach herself.

This constant conversation with the concept of liveliness is successfully captured in her work, as it primarily deals with the transition between life and death within plants, and even the life after death. Beatrice’s work allows plants to enter a different phase, or plane, of life, despite being physically dead or dying.

However, Beatrice no longer believes that this intricate dialogue with the transcendence of being adequately conveys her motives. She hopes to further her understanding of the subconscious reasoning for her work, why she does what she does, to ‘see more clearly’. She wants to identify where her work comes from, why she does it, and what or who it communicates with. Not only to understand herself better, but to help others understand the importance of honest, natural work, and to value the things that lead up to it.

She recently started learning Jin Shin Jyutsu, a Japanese healing art that induces relaxation and eases stress. Jin Shin Jyutsu focuses on energy that is distributed across fields within the body, that can be stimulated with pressure to release tension. Beatrice believes that this concept of energy-fields can be translated into most things, particularly society.

An example of how these energy fields have affected Beatrice outside of Jin Shin Jyutsu is the newfound relevance of the dandelion. The dandelion has become a recurring motif in her life, something that constantly appears and accompanies her. The relevance of the dandelion became apparent over time; it wasn’t a conscious decision, she had to understand the importance of it in her daily life first.

She has since realized that there are numerous artists that predominantly engage with dandelions. In her eyes, this common theme creates an ‘energy-field’ on a different plane. She believes that this common theme presents itself as an energy-related task, or purpose, despite not yet being able to fully understand the dimensions of the task herself.

Whilst her work used to be heavily inspired by various fairytales from different cultures, she now chooses to see the dandelion as a ‘leitmotif’, as it presents a much more realistic and attainable moral than the ‘hero-stories’.

Reducing the inspiration behind her work to something more understandable and ‘real’ also brings her closer to the work, making it easier for the creative process that leads up to the final product to be ‘healing’, similarly to Jin Shin Jyutsu.

The creative process consists mainly of wandering through nature, following the attraction of energies she feels physically, that lead her to certain plants, flowers, and seeds she then incorporates into her work. A very natural progression, which both harmonizes and contrasts with the dream-like qualities of the fairytales that inspired her previous work.

Once Beatrice finds the materials she would like to work with, she brings them back to the studio and starts experimenting. She experiments with the plants in relation to fabrics in order to identify and understand the relationship between the two, which then allows the final product to grow from its own. The construction of her garments has become so natural that she is often only partially aware of what is happening, the only fully conscious step, therefore, being the experimentation.

At this point in our conversation, the sound of someone playing the piano softly creeps into the room. Beatrice stands up and quickly returns with a swatch of thin grey fabric that has slim long pods sewn into it. The pods are a very matt dark red. She starts to spray small bursts of water onto the swatch, which slowly starts to unravel, revealing a silver colour on the inside of the pods, stretching the swatch out to almost twice its previous size.

She says that this silver shines when it’s wet and that it would be nice to make a dress using this technique, something that moves on its own accord while being worn, something that carries its own life. She believes that life and death are in a constant fluent dialogue, that some things that are alive carry less life than some things that are dead, and vice versa. While saying this she toys with the now unravelled fabric swatch and concludes that it takes longer for it to shrink than it took to unravel.

Another vital part of her creative process is the sensibility of her fingertips, how it is much more important to feel how two mediums work together rather than to see, once again taking note of the energy-exchange between fingertips and material. She wishes that people would start working with their hands more often again, and states how crucial hands-on work is for the mental-physical relationship of a person.

The need for understanding of her subject matter, as well as the introspective need for logic and understanding of her craft, help Beatrice connect to her internal world and outer surroundings, again undermining the healing qualities of her work.

She hopes to rediscover these healing qualities by trying her luck with menswear again, the project she was working on before her 2–3-year hiatus. Menswear deemed to be a difficult task for Beatrice, primarily due to the uncertainty of sexuality within most men. With a majority of men being rather uncomfortable with their sexuality, over-masculinizing themselves to the point where it seems as if they’re scared someone will rob them of their manhood, she is unsure of how to approach the subject matter as she simply does not yet have enough understanding of what she is trying to convey.

““Until then, I’d like to teach humanity how to cry, how to be sad.”

“I’m working towards death, the biggest challenge, something no one can prepare you for. When my time comes, I’d like to consciously transition from life to death, hopefully, I’ll have learned how to do that by then. Until then, I’d like to teach humanity how to cry, how to be sad.”

@aiobe

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