The Lines are sets of sculptures that integrate into the spaces in which they are presented, tracing lines from floor to ceiling that create an exhausting filature: Eat or be eaten.
These ceramics are reminiscent of devouring scenes. Eating the other, digesting them, and ultimately perhaps incorporating them. A dog's molt envelops what prefigures a snout, itself dissolving, sometimes biting a hand, which is also sometimes a jaw, sometimes a support, intertwining dog and wolf, humans or shells without any hierarchy. It is also a way of thinking about life “as a circulation, as a gift from a community of ancestors, and death as recycling, a flow that continues in an ecological and ancestral community of origins.” 1
The lines are complex narrative wefts that contradict each other, unfolding alternative versions of the same scenario. They digest, spit out and repeat the incessant game of metamorphoses, in the same insubordinate movement of no kind to a cause-and-effect relationship between the scenes represented. Confusion arises when we try to distinguish the devourer from the wearer of the other's skin, who might put it on like a disguise. Between ornaments and organisms, these anthropomorphic sculptures seek troubled visual syntaxes, gradually extending the continuum that runs through my work.
1 Val Plumwood
DEVOURING LINES CONTINUUM
2022-2024
Stoneware ceramics, petroleum-like glaze
Oxidation firing, 1220°, mostly fired in the studio kiln, in Brussels
Variable sizes (+- 50 cm) and compositions
Photo : Théo Desmaizières, Noé Znidarsic, Tim Evers, Dieter Van Caneghem