Barbara Putz-Plecko is a visual artist and an academic based in Vienna, Austria. Her artistic projects build on a basis of artistic research encompassing diverse mediums in both the analogue and the digital fields. Her artistic interest centres around a deep interrogation of forms of being, of obvious as well as inconspicuous traces of mutual response, cause and effect and, generally, relationships. The two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and often space-consuming works that she creates present themselves differently to the viewer according to the context in which they have been placed and the manner in which they have been placed there.

Since 1997, Barbara Putz-Plecko has been a professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and, until 2023, was head both of the textiles department and of the multimedia department of Art and Communication Practices. During her tenure, the two departments shared an emphasis on the contextualization of artistic practices as well as on the potentials and effectiveness of artistic strategies in communities and systems. As artist and researcher, she has worked with many academic and non-academic institutions as well as grassroot organizations and has participated in, initiated, and supervised numerous artistic projects in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central America. This work has resulted in a long-term research focus on the potentials of interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, and trans-cultural processes of cooperation.

Spending some time in the Nirox Sculpture Park in June of this year allowed her to familiarize herself with this physical, spiritual, and social landscape along with its historical, cultural, and artistic specificities. Research done by the Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso on plants seen as social organisms capable of communication and cooperation led the artist to produce her first artistic sketches for the project Soil and Water.