Julianna Cerqueira Leite is a Brazilian sculptor who held a lecture in the Aesthetic and Practice module; however, I feel that I can reflect on her process in her work in this module. She also explores movement but not as a theme itself but as a way of communicating the topic she is exploring. In her beginning, she showed work that she did when she was studying, and it made me think differently about movement. She used clay as her material because it was great at recreating information physically, having a mnemonic quality, and using her movements’ force to create marks in the material (hitting it with a chair). Although the action and the process were ‘violent’, the outcome did not translate violence. Her other piece was he recording the actions of the body as she dug herself into the clay. The negative of the hole recorded the movement of her body and the process of this downwards method.
The pieces that got me questioning my thinking were her Curl (Figure 1) and Inversion, Clockwise (Figure 2) / Inversion, Arch (Figure 3). Looking at the piece, I can feel a lot of pain, perhaps because of how the body is curled up into a ball. She explains that in her piece, Curl had just gone through surgery and how it was the only thing she could make.
Figure 1: Curl 2, Plaster, fabric, glass fiber, steel (Cerqueira Leite, 2013)
Figure 2: Inversion, Clockwise, Ink and colored pencil on canvas (Cerqueira Leite, 2012)
Figure 3: Inversion, Arch, Ink and colored pencil on canvas (Cerqueira Leite, 2012)
When asking about her thoughts and her process when creating Inversion, Clockwise/ Inversion, Arch, her response made me question my approach to my practice. When she created these two drawings (Figure 2 and 3), she was challenging Yves Klein's, a French artist, series Anthropometries. Uves Klein used naked women covered in paint and used their body as human paintbrushes to create this Anthropometries series. Julianna Cerqueira Leite saw this as problematic and wanted to explore this herself, creating the piece with her own body. When we recreated, she realised how much information is missed when the picks up her hand and replaces it back on the paper. The connecting lines fill in the missing information when we move the position of her body. She then moved away from this idea of creating the body's gestures as she said she wanted to move away from the body and the connotations that come with it, especially with the female body.
She talked about how she was interested in not the weight of the body but more than the form and how she wanted to express something important to her that at that time wasn't being communicated. She mentioned how she thought the Martha Graham contraction was beautiful and how the people's body found in Pompeii were in similar positions. The pull and push of force within the body to create the curve and shape was influencing. It brought her to thinking about how people use gestures to explain natural disasters and recorded a man showing the movement of his arms mimicking the disaster when telling their stories, like how in hurricane Katrina and the houses that got torn away, the movement of the strength of the wind.
The process of looking at her own from then going to a larger firm and what the art can to and mean is especially inspiring. To not represent herself but almost like an actor being a character. This made me rethink how I have been approaching the theme movement. I have been focused on recording the gesture of movement, both physically or digitally but haven't considered what kind of meaning the human form, especially the female form, brought to the piece. Hearing this almost was a relief, making me come outside this box that I had unintentionally put myself in and explore other means and perhaps the material having movement be a part of the process instead of the theme.
During her seminar, she also talked about how the material she used (clay) has a mnemonic quality where she was able to record the energy and information. This had me thinking, it would be interesting to experiment with the properties that clay has to offer, using different techniques and methods to explore what clay is as a material?
References
Images.
Figure 1: Cerqueira Leite, J., 2013. Curl 2. [image] Available at: <https://www.pkf-imagecollection.org/search/work/10376?category_id=4&show=all&browse-submit=BROWSE&> [Accessed 18 October 2020].
Figure 2: Cerqueira Leite, J., 2012. Inversion, Clockwise, 2012. [image] Available at: <https://www.julianacerqueiraleite.com/inversion-series-2012> [Accessed 18 October 2020].
Figure 3: Cerqueira Leite, J., 2012. Inversion, Arch, 2012. [image] Available at: <https://www.julianacerqueiraleite.com/inversion-series-2012> [Accessed 18 October 2020].
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