Juliette Clovis is a multidisciplinary french contemporary artist. Her plastic work is organized around 3 big topics that are the links between human and nature, the opposition between life and death and the dialogue between tradition and modernity.

For years, Juliette Clovis worked on female identity and the representationof women in contemporary society and its history. In her most recent works, her women are completely transformed into hybrid beings, mixes of history, myths and chimerical dreams. The female bodies are invaded by a profusion of wildlife and flora elements, evoking a nature that is both soft and worrying. Like a Hitchcock-inspired scene, we can almost hear the noise of the jungle: the flapping of a bird’s wings, the slither of a creeping snake or the croak of a frog. Fascinated by the wild beauty of Nature discovered during her different trips, the artist draws inspiration from it to create her human jungles and to explore the wild aspect of human body. She questions the balance of power between Human and Nature. Conjugating ambiguity and employing metaphors, Juliette’s work wobbles between a prophetic picture announcing the birth of a new living being, human body with a half-animal half-vegetable face; and the onset of death caused by an hungry nature wanting to take back its rights.

Art is matter and matter makes Art in Juliette Clovis’work.

For more than 10 years, Juliette explored her subjects across a very specific technique: armed with cutters, she cuts up butterflies, birds and other vegetables in vinyl leaves glued together on black plexiglas. Despite abundant references to Art History, the choice of these materials and techniques avoid habitual codes. Since 2015, the Nature thematic has withdrawn from Juliette’s two dimentional artworks to invade her new sculpture creations made in Limoges porcelain. As a logical continuation in the creation of the artist, her subjects now take form under her fingers and fill with material for a new 3-dimentional reality. The artist plunged with passion into this very difficult technique, which she works in an art residency at la Manufacture La Seynie. Founded in 1774, La Seynie is the oldest Limoges porcelain manufacture. All her sculptures are unique, made by the artist’s hand, in the traditional way of Limoges porcelain. Limoges porcelain is a fine translucent porcelain equivalent of Sèvres, Meissen or Nymphenburg. And for the sculptures with painting, they are also all made by the artist with traditional on-glaze paintings. The choice of this noble and classical material allows her to confront her deeply contemporary vision of art across a traditional and ancestral technology. All her porcelains sculptures are mixes between contemporary expressions and classical forms, dialogue between history and modernity.

Juliette Clovis: website / instagram
Via: thisiscolossal.com