Nathalie Campion
b. 1964, Belgium
Originally from the Belgian Ardennes, sculptor and ceramist Nathalie Campion draws her inspiration from the forests of her childhood.
A forest is a daydreaming place. The sounds, the smells, the vegetal elements that compose it all invite one to have sweet dreams or mysterious nightmares. The strains seem petrified, the leaves seem to block the sun and the damp soft ground whispers under our feet.
However, this place has a welcoming atmosphere, an intimate sense of kindness. A paradox then appears : between fascination and repulsion, fear and desire, miracle and sacrifice. The work of Nathalie Campion addresses the questions that this duality provides.
The resulting ceramics, their volumes, their shapes, remind us of distant forests. The clay is lifting, unraveling. Nathalie Campion works with it as if it were a living body. Her relation with it is tactile, carnal, and the work that we see is the main evidence of this relationship. The earth, the clay, becomes a vector of sensuality, an object that desires, a subject.
With a work resulting from a collision of two different powers : Nature and Human. Clay as a material that is built by violence.
Nathalie Campion works with this violence. The viewer is the main witness of this brutality. Clay is a fragile material, but it is mostly free. To oppose strength and fragility would have no meaning here. The material shows us that fragility lies in strength, it composes it. The opposite of strength is not fragility, it is weakness. And clay has no weakness. To work with a material so fragile and yet so strong is a way of demonstrating a new relationship with the world : Resilience, knowledge, awareness. Idleness is fertile.
As we observe the ceramics and the videos made by Nathalie Campion, we can understand something intimate about her : she is an angry woman. Death, blood, suffering clay, all those elements tend to demonstrate something : the world is going to ruin. Human heritage brings a lot of pain to the world. The material goes through critical states, it almost breaks. The darkness adds to the story. It is a manifest. The planet, the human behavior, everything is melted together, everything seems to be about to collapse.
Nathalie Campion works in balance on the ridge line : facing the forest, on the edge of a precipice
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Originally from the Belgian Ardennes, sculptor and ceramist Nathalie Campion draws her inspiration from the forests of her childhood.
A forest is a daydreaming place. The sounds, the smells, the vegetal elements that compose it all invite one to have sweet dreams or mysterious nightmares. The strains seem petrified, the leaves seem to block the sun and the damp soft ground whispers under our feet.
However, this place has a welcoming atmosphere, an intimate sense of kindness. A paradox then appears : between fascination and repulsion, fear and desire, miracle and sacrifice. The work of Nathalie Campion addresses the questions that this duality provides.
The resulting ceramics, their volumes, their shapes, remind us of distant forests. The clay is lifting, unraveling. Nathalie Campion works with it as if it were a living body. Her relation with it is tactile, carnal, and the work that we see is the main evidence of this relationship. The earth, the clay, becomes a vector of sensuality, an object that desires, a subject.
With a work resulting from a collision of two different powers : Nature and Human. Clay as a material that is built by violence.
Nathalie Campion works with this violence. The viewer is the main witness of this brutality. Clay is a fragile material, but it is mostly free. To oppose strength and fragility would have no meaning here. The material shows us that fragility lies in strength, it composes it. The opposite of strength is not fragility, it is weakness. And clay has no weakness. To work with a material so fragile and yet so strong is a way of demonstrating a new relationship with the world : Resilience, knowledge, awareness. Idleness is fertile.
As we observe the ceramics and the videos made by Nathalie Campion, we can understand something intimate about her : she is an angry woman. Death, blood, suffering clay, all those elements tend to demonstrate something : the world is going to ruin. Human heritage brings a lot of pain to the world. The material goes through critical states, it almost breaks. The darkness adds to the story. It is a manifest. The planet, the human behavior, everything is melted together, everything seems to be about to collapse.
Nathalie Campion works in balance on the ridge line : facing the forest, on the edge of a precipice
Read more...
— I have a great need for silence and solitude, and my work is intrinsically linked to my inner growth. My pieces take time to build, the interrelationship of space and time is particularly important to me. The work that goes into creating my pieces is extremely repetitive – a long, painstaking and daily affair, but it suits me perfectly. While I create, I listen to music or radio interviews. I have multiple piece in progress at the same time, and the one I choose to focus on at any given moment is determined by my state of mind. Some of them require a great deal of accuracy and concentration, conversely, seeking out points of tension and balance actually feels like play. It can happen that I’ll spend weeks on a project only to completely change course and to eventually go in a completely different direction. In fact, the final result invariably differs from the initial idea.
The resulting ceramics, their volumes, their shapes, remind us of distant forests. The clay is lifting, unraveling. Nathalie Campion works with it as if it were a living body. Her relation with it is tactile, carnal, and the work that we see is the main evidence of this relationship. The earth, the clay, becomes a vector of sensuality, an object that desires, a subject.
With a work resulting from a collision of two different powers : Nature and Human. Clay as a material that is built by violence.
Nathalie Campion works with this violence. The viewer is the main witness of this brutality. Clay is a fragile material, but it is mostly free. To oppose strength and fragility would have no meaning here. The material shows us that fragility lies in strength, it composes it. The opposite of strength is not fragility, it is weakness. And clay has no weakness. To work with a material so fragile and yet so strong is a way of demonstrating a new relationship with the world : Resilience, knowledge, awareness. Idleness is fertile.
As we observe the ceramics and the videos made by Nathalie Campion, we can understand something intimate about her : she is an angry woman. Death, blood, suffering clay, all those elements tend to demonstrate something : the world is going to ruin. Human heritage brings a lot of pain to the world. The material goes through critical states, it almost breaks. The darkness adds to the story. It is a manifest. The planet, the human behavior, everything is melted together, everything seems to be about to collapse.
Nathalie Campion works in balance on the ridge line : facing the forest, on the edge of a precipice
