The Solo-Project 
Art Fair 22

Willing to express the power and fragility of the natural world, Campion’s work is informed by the cycle of life and nature.

In her sculptures, the body is secretly present. The different shapes, the tree stumps imply this presence.

It has no face.

Like a tribute, one last elegy.

The resulting ceramics remind us of distant forests. The clay is lifting, unraveling. Nathalie Campion works with it as if it were a living body. Her relation with it is tactile, carnal, and the final result is the main evidence of this relationship. The earth, the clay, becomes a vector of sensuality, an object that desires, a subject.

Nathalie Campion’s use of color is a rejection of the inessential. It allows the existence of those shapes, give it as they are, devoid of unnecessary artefacts.

Peeled like a fruit in which we would discover a secret treasure, the work seems to be slowly crumbling. It starts a journey towards the damp soil. This material that melts into the ground is reborn. The strips contain something, they are around it. They were built as walls, fortresses. They keep a secret, they fossilize it, they heal it.

A paradox then appears : between fascination and repulsion, fear and desire, miracle and sacrifice. The work of Nathalie Campion addresses the questions raised by this duality.

A tree stump is a river . It’s the resilience of a strong nature that renews itself while going through death. It is a magnificent self sufficiency system, the second part of a cycle, the idea of a sacrifice.

Nathalie Campion creates with this violence. The viewer being the main witness of this brutality.

Death – suffering clay, all those elements tend to demonstrate something : human heritage brings a lot of pain to the world. The material goes through critical states, it almost breaks. The planet, the human behavior, everything is melted together, everything seems to be about to collapse.

Anger, anguish, suffering of the mother earth, are illustrated here in a plastic vertigo expressing the inescapable with strength and melancholy, a paradoxical combination of two powers: Nature and Humanity.

Nathalie Campion’s sculptures and video carry this paradox that make theme go from birth to death in an endless circle.