Exonip, 2023

Glazed ceramics

Dimensions variable

ARTWORK STATEMENT

Exonip is a group of ceramic bone white cacti, each growing their own squishy silicone nipple. Those bodily plants, with their bloody teeth-like spikes are reminiscent of a cruel puzzle between plant forms and humanoid bodies, left to reproduce unsupervised. Here the cacti imitate enlarged and deformed breasts totally detached from their body – much like the way body imagery is shown fragmented, subjectless, in order to create desire. These hybrid creatures become forms belonging to a dystopian mythical future, where body parts cross-pollinate to create their own rules of seduction.

BIOGRAPHY

Solanne Bernard (b. in Paris) lives and works in London where she received an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (2020).

She works predominantly on installations merging the imagery of abstracted body parts and plants into hybrid sculptural forms. The hybridity of her works helps highlight the roles that the fluidity and intertwinement of things together have in constructing a sense of unease and visceral displacement. In this way, the work explores how subjectivity can oscillate between human/animal/plant and object, pushing the material to see what it can do as a subject and finding ways to act out the complexities between attraction, violence and disgust.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

3 – Good Health and Well-being

5 – Gender Equality

14 – Life Below Water

15 – Life on Land