Heike Stuckstedde

Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Artist statement

German light artist Heike Stuckstedde, aka ATARA, lives and works in Vienna. With a background in art history and interior architecture, she has consciously focused her artistic practice on light as a material and medium. At the core of her work are fibre optics, which she manually transforms through surface treatment to create delicate, inhomogeneous lines of light. Embedded in materials such as handmade straw silk, textiles, filament yarn, fiberglass, stone, moss or metal, light becomes an organic, tangible presence. Her objects and installations move between precise lines of light and diffuse clouds, creating depth, translucency and shifting perceptions of space. Stuckstedde develops each work directly from the qualities of its materials and its spatial context. Lightness and translucency allow her works to occupy space without fully defining it, inviting viewers to look through, around and beyond them. Depending on perspective and movement, the works reveal changing visual relationships and fleeting encounters. Her practice explores the interplay of light, material, nature, technology and space. Drawing on the traditions of architectural and light art - from Tadao Ando and Le Corbusier to James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson - Stuckstedde approaches light not simply as illumination, but as an independent artistic medium that transforms material and space into a shared perceptual experience.

Artwork