Closing drink
Sunday, 03.12.2023
11:00 → 19:00
In presence of the artist
Open
Wednesday to Sunday
14:00 → 18:00
at Boondael Chapel
Art Center
10, Square du Vieux Tilleul
1050 Ixelles, Belgium
Keen to express the power and vulnerability of the natural world, visual artist Nathalie Campion is presenting an original ceramic installation for the Chapelle de Boondael, inspired by life, nature and the universal bond that unites us all.
After years of exploration and inner journeys, the sculptor appropriates the material and shapes it in reflection of the immensity of nature and the infinite answers that reside within it. Her research has progressively led her to revolutionize the everyday aspects of her practice and transcend her imagination. This necessary and cathartic process of putting herself at risk eventually caused an internal crack, from which the buried and intimate pieces of the self can now emerge, much like the diversity and fertility of life beneath the bark of a tree.
The installation created for the exhibition offers a journey through the sensuality of the earth. Drawing inspiration from various contexts, it traverses the fragile and gaping earth's crust while evoking the multitude of bodies subject to confinement. It questions the possibility of harmony: as the protection of the earth's crust continues to crack, and the earth fragments into countless pieces, humans, tirelessly, either exhibit themselves or protect themselves in fear of confronting the debacle.
Keen to express the power and vulnerability of the natural world, visual artist Nathalie Campion is presenting an original ceramic installation for the Chapelle de Boondael, inspired by life, nature and the universal bond that unites us all.
After years of exploration and inner journeys, the sculptor appropriates the material and shapes it in reflection of the immensity of nature and the infinite answers that reside within it. Her research has progressively led her to revolutionize the everyday aspects of her practice and transcend her imagination. This necessary and cathartic process of putting herself at risk eventually caused an internal crack, from which the buried and intimate pieces of the self can now emerge, much like the diversity and fertility of life beneath the bark of a tree.
The installation created for the exhibition offers a journey through the sensuality of the earth. Drawing inspiration from various contexts, it traverses the fragile and gaping earth's crust while evoking the multitude of bodies subject to confinement. It questions the possibility of harmony: as the protection of the earth's crust continues to crack, and the earth fragments into countless pieces, humans, tirelessly, either exhibit themselves or protect themselves in fear of confronting the debacle.
The omnipresent white, reminiscent of the sacrificial and the liturgical, here foreshadows absence and the immaterial. Similar to her sculptures, the artist has long hidden behind protective bark to the extent of forgetting any possibility of a personal life. The protective and damaged layers, ever-present in her work, like a second skin, open for the first time, causing a transformative movement: they become the limbs of an organism, a receptacle of a life both lived and fantasized.
Campion's sculptures, free from any pretension, draw from a transgenerational emotional memory and her dreams, where nature and humanity intertwine to create a poetic and sensitive narrative. For her, death is not final and carries a form of vitality, bestowed upon it by life itself. She envisions that after their disappearance, bodies (re)become forests and, in doing so, return the energy stolen from the elements in a final breath of eternity.
The fragmented images that appear to us are connected to childhood as well as organic bodies, inspired by pre-Columbian art and infused with contemporary artistic references. Placed side by side, they form an enigma: an indecipherable and elusive language for anyone, not even for the artist, who is evidently entranced by their rhythm.
In the presence of Campion's work, we experience a return to the Earth and become witnesses to a dialogue between its pockmarked surface and buried fragments of life. The fragility and density of the work resonate with the lived or rather unlived experience, like a dream, of which Nathalie Campion seems to be the guardian. Simultaneously addressing the memory of nature and the potential of human evolution, the artist's serene and confident work, profoundly human and subjective, shows us their interdependence and raises the question of life, or rather, rebirth.
Barbara Cuglietta, 2023
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.
Louis Zérathe, 2021
