Artists

Claudia Six is an Austrian multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves between puppetry, soft sculpture, installation, performance, painting, and writing to explore one of humanity's most profound questions: what makes us perceive someone rather than something? Instead of allowing a single medium to define her work, she treats every material and discipline as a tool for investigating consciousness, empathy, and perception. Her haunting yet deeply compassionate creations challenge the invisible boundaries between living beings and objects, inviting viewers to reconsider how quickly the mind assigns personality, emotion, and value. Through carefully constructed encounters, Claudia transforms ordinary materials into emotionally charged experiences that blur the line between reality and imagination.

Her artistic journey has been driven by curiosity rather than convention. While her work has appeared in state opera productions, major theatres, and international exhibitions, success gradually became less important than understanding the deeper questions that continually shaped her creative life. Earlier in her career, she viewed art as something that needed to be produced, promoted, and measured through external recognition. Over time, however, she realized that this approach distanced her from the authentic motivations behind her practice. Instead of creating to satisfy expectations, she began creating to better understand the world and the remarkable ways people experience it.

Living as an autistic artist has profoundly influenced Claudia Six's creative philosophy. Rather than viewing autism as a limitation, she describes it as a source of artistic freedom that allows her to pursue genuine curiosity without the pressure of performance or constant visibility. Her work grows from an honest fascination with questions that have remained with her since childhood—questions about memory, imagination, identity, and consciousness. She recalls wondering where the boundary lies between a memory and something imagined, a curiosity that continues to shape every project she creates today.

Puppets eventually became the ideal language for exploring these ideas, although they were never the original goal. Claudia discovered that a figure made from fabric and foam can acquire a personality within seconds simply because viewers choose to perceive it as someone. At the same time, society often overlooks the emotional lives of living beings because they have been categorized as something instead. This contradiction lies at the heart of her artistic practice. Through puppets, soft sculptures, installations, and performances, she constructs situations that gently disrupt these unconscious assumptions, encouraging audiences to observe how perception itself influences reality.

For Claudia, every artwork functions as a small experiment. Rather than presenting clear conclusions, she creates environments where viewers become active participants in exploring empathy, projection, and emotional response. Her work does not argue that objects possess consciousness. Instead, it asks why humans so readily assign life, personality, and emotion to certain things while denying those same qualities to others. These investigations extend beyond aesthetics into questions about ethics, relationships, and the invisible psychological processes that quietly shape everyday experience.

Claudia Six ultimately sees the world as something far more fluid than fixed reality suggests. She believes perception is constantly filtered through memory, instinct, culture, and survival, leaving people to experience not the world as it truly exists, but the version their minds construct. Through her multidisciplinary practice, she encourages viewers to pause before making unconscious judgments and to reconsider the fragile boundary between someone and something. Inspired by neuroscientist Anil Seth's observation that "We don't perceive the world as it is, we perceive it as it is useful for us to do so," Claudia continues to create work that reveals how empathy, imagination, and awareness can fundamentally reshape the way we understand ourselves and the world around us.