Featured Student Artist | September 2024

Maya Huber

Landscape ©Maya Huber

Tell us a little bit about your practice as a maker. Where do you thrive? Where do you struggle?

I know both, maybe both belong together... On the one hand, it's perfectionism that causes some trouble. On the other hand, the draft that has been fought for can also become a successful one.

Work is created, connected to a new experience. It's really wonderful when an impulse from nature, a piece of music, a thought becomes something spontaneous — a stroke of a brush, a line, a mark, a sound of color — just like that.

Banners | ©Maya Huber

The Klingspor Offenbach writing workshop has offered a summer school every year since the association was founded, often in monasteries in beautiful places. In 2005 we were fortunate to have Laurie Doctor as a lecturer at Salmuenster Monastery. LANDSCAPE... Laurie as a storyteller took us into other worlds, inner images emerged, texts full of myth and poetry spoke to us, with a wide variety of tools we went to work with joy and freedom, “beyond the horizon”. Nature sketches, drawing, writing and painting were created — “when I met my Muse”… — that happened in these days. I was richly gifted. In the following years there were opportunities to experience Laurie again, with ever new impulses...

What is the strangest object in your studio?

The Goblin - The little guy moved in with me one day. The studio he came from no longer exists. He likes to settle here and there and feels comfortable among my utensils, guards my shells, stones, pottery shards and much more.

©Maya Huber

What is one intention you have for your practice this year?

Time is precious, life is diverse. I sort through and discover some things that appeal to me. Some of the things I once did can inspire new things without denying the layers that lie underneath. Or I find interesting details — excerpts can be surprising and exciting, can become material, for example for a book — a new process begins. An amazing experience is when I let what the pen or brush or whatever “does” happen. Our charismatic, great teacher and founder of the Klingspor Offenbach writing workshop, Karlgeorg Hoefer, liked to talk about “It” — “it” writes...