Christel Dillbohner (born 1956) is a German artist whose installations, paintings, and assemblages are deeply involved with the relationship between personal and cultural memory and the human struggle to live in threatened environments.
[1] Her emphasis on art as a transformational undertaking, as well as her use of highly tactile materials such as wax, tar, silk cocoons, and old wood, show the influence on her work of Joseph Beuys.
[3] Dillbohner's thematic, site-specific installations generally meld painting, various forms of assemblage, and works on and made of paper to create what one curator has termed "landscapes of the psyche".
[5] A series of installations entitled Sippwells in the early 2000s, inspired by Australian Aboriginal culture, featured encaustic paintings and large hanging sheets of perforated waxed paper, while the titular sip wells (depressions scraped in damp sand) were represented by shallow clay bowls set out in a row in a layer of crushed charcoal.
[2] A central element of her 2005 installation Histologies was 365 paper filter cones suspended just above the floor with monofilament, creating a sea of shapes that swayed in response to the gallery's slightest air movements.