Instructor: Bettina Egli Sennhauser
Tuesday - Thursday
June 1 - 3
10am - 4pm
3 sessions
The layered, fragmented paintings created during this workshop evoke a sense of time passing—of erosion, decay, transformation, memory, and traces left behind. At the heart of our exploration is the idea of impermanence: the understanding that nothing remains fixed and that change is an inherent part of everything we encounter.
Working with fresco materials and encaustic, we enter a process that is constantly evolving. Surfaces crack, layers disappear and re-emerge, wax transforms what lies beneath, and unexpected marks begin to suggest new directions. Rather than working toward a predetermined outcome, we practice responding to what is happening in the moment—observing, adapting, letting go, and integrating the unforeseen.
Through building and eroding, covering and revealing, preserving and transforming, the creative process itself becomes an exploration of impermanence. By allowing change and uncertainty to become part of the work, we discover possibilities we could not have planned—and create surfaces that carry the history of their own making.
Bettina Egli Sennhauser lives and works near Basel, Switzerland. Working with natural and sustainable materials, she builds layered surfaces that translate lived impressions of her environment into fields of color, texture, and subtle gesture. Her works explore relationships between people, place, and material memory, unfolding as contemplative spaces that invite for reflection.
Since 2018, Bettina has extended her practice through international workshops and art retreats across Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, Ireland, and the United States, sharing process-based approaches to material exploration. In 2023, she published her first practical workbook on the Cold Wax & Oil technique.
She is a member of the SGBK (Swiss Society of Women Visual Artists) and the International Encaustic Association, and serves as a Core Artist with R&F Handmade Paints. Bettina has received scholarships from the International Encaustic Conference and her work has been juried into various exhibitions in Provincetown, New York, and Palo Alto. She has also been invited to speak at the International Encaustic Conferences in Provincetown, Cape Cod, and at the Celtic Convergence Conference in Ireland, contributing to the discourse on contemporary encaustic practices.
Her work has been exhibited in Switzerland, Italy, and the United States. In 2024, she received the Director’s Choice Award at the International Encaustic Conference.
Bettina is represented by Soderbergh Gallery of Sustainable Art in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.