Aurélie Slonina

aurelie@slonina.com / intro / infos / publications / textes / pdf.fr / pdf.eng / english

 

 

My artistic work straddles the boundary between two mutually reinforcing practices: intervention in the public space and shaping objects in my studio. The first gives my work a social and collective dimension, while my manual work is more fragile and intimate.

Since the early 2000s, I've been part of the movement to take art out of institutions. I exhibit outdoors and am interested in the complex relationships we have with our environment. I'm developing a reflection on our ambivalence, caused by the real desire we all have to get back to nature's roots, and the ever-growing fantasies of a technological future. In our desire to dominate nature, we seem to have lost control of it. My installations and sculptures bring together opposing elements, reflecting the tension born of these contradictions. My interventions are anomalies that find their place to the point of merging with their environment. The hybrid nature I produce describes a landscape in full mutation, at the frontier of reality.

For some years now, I've been intensifying my reflections on the excesses of technology through the artisanal prism of ceramics. With ceramics, I explore a more immediate scale. I use earthenware, stoneware and porcelain, as well as their various glazes, to achieve very different results, sometimes rough or, on the contrary, extremely delicate and fragile. The technical mastery I have acquired enables me to create objects of great realism and to play, as in my outdoor installations, with the boundaries of reality.

I invent a world in which graffiti is made of geraniums, stump fungus grows on plastic garden furniture until it absorbs it, weeds are disciplined and form formal gardens, or garbage is made of gold-gloss porcelain, fragile and precious. A world in which whimsical nature overflows and undesirables - graffiti, weeds, garbage and the like - become the real stars. An everyday life at once banal and enchanted, where our own internal contradictions are expressed in the face of a suffocating ecological crisis.