The survival of the body

About Julia Morlot’s Cameos

White, matt and circular, the Cameos are ceramic bas-reliefs revealing, among small stringy excrescences, fragments of anonymous and broken bodies. There is something both pleasing and painful in watching these bodies suspended between appearance and disappearance. The organic mass struggles with the proliferation of filaments. So the desire for fiction is there. One thinks of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of the mythical Daphne becoming a laurel to escape Apollo’s eagerness. One thinks of the coat of arms singing a fragment of the loved one. One thinks of psychoanalysis, of the capacity of sensation to make consciousness emerge in a specific point of the body, of hysteria which paralyses the hand, the ear or the leg. Cameos are bearers of sensuality. Julia Morlot’s works are often situated in this interstice between anxiety and softness, strangeness and seduction. The artist has chosen to work with earthenware with the same high standards as her work. Everything could break at any moment, it is necessary to dry, open and close, the operation is delicate, the body in fragile earth, the slightest mistake and it is the loss. All combinations are to be considered to reach the vulnerable point where the body fragment will be. Like the medallions of the past, the Cameos suspend time. Julia Morlot, in sculpting clay, decelerates, searches, gropes, one sculpture adding to another, the next one always arising from the previous one, like a passageway that opens up towards the unknown, from memory to adventure.

Florence Andoka