Judiciously mixing precious and nonprecious materials, Fleischhut honors a piece of plastic picked up on the beach with the same care and consideration she might bestow upon a chunk of amethyst or topaz. Trained as a goldsmith in Pforzheim and Hamburg, Germany, Fleischhut expanded her vision as an artist and designer at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Institute, both in the Netherlands, where she developed a designer’s eye for complex materiality, a sculptor’s sense of scale, and an alchemist’s drive to explore the universe by unlocking the secrets of the earth.
