Paloma Proudfoot has cultivated a private anatomy, utilizing ceramics to materialize a proound, corporeal and philosophical investigation into the physique’s existential essence—located between internal and outer worlds, individuality and collectivity.
Usually cut up, dissected, or reassembled, her sculptural figures expose the alienating legacy of Cartesian dualism: the entrenched separation between the res cogitans of the thoughts and the res extensa of the physique, between consciousness and unconsciousness, topic and object. But moderately than resist this fragmentation, Proudfoot embraces it—her sculptures inhabit a liminal area the place division turns into fertile floor for continuous transformation.
Knowledgeable by psychoanalytic and feminist discourse, her figures don’t depict our bodies as secure, self-contained wholes however as permeable, evolving websites of battle and changing into. They resist coherence and as an alternative discover company of their capability for metamorphosis.
Characterised by their puppetsque look, Proudfoot’s ceramic sculptures have interaction in a steady strategy of embodying and disembodying feelings and sensations, exposing the constructed nature of fastened identification and the fluidity of affective states. By articulating the ten- sion between vulnerability and resistance, intimacy and estrangement, they reveal the physique not as a secure kind, however as a mutable vessel by which identification is endlessly negotiated. Enacting the perpetual pressure between physique notion and its symbolic expression, these sculptures invite viewers to ponder the complicated relationship between internal expertise and outward kind.
On the coronary heart of the exhibition at Fondazione Bonollo is a monumental ceramic panel Speech Weavers, standing like an altarpiece on the heart of the chapel, depicting three feminine figures engaged within the lively, reciprocal act of listening and receiving. Impressed by the historic pre- sence of nuns who as soon as listened to Mass behind gates in that very area, Proudfoot makes an attempt to translate one of many physique’s most ephemeral and invisible sensory actions into picture and tactile kind. As in a lot of her work, Paloma subverts the passivity traditionally assigned to listening, recasting her feminine figures as lively brokers in a strategy of interconnection and alternate. Sound emerges as a dynamic power—increasing, reshaping, and animating area by waves that each allow and accompany this reciprocal act.
Fluctuating within the second gallery, we encounter fragmented gestures and remoted expres- sions—figures adrift in an unnamed narrative. Suspended within the limitless permutations of human existence in relation to the world, they inhabit a steady strategy of transformation. Her deconstructed mannequins and anatomical fashions visualize the physique past restrictive binaries, exposing the constraints of schematic representations.
By enjoying with the phantasm of abstract kinds, she reveals the physique as sensorial, psycho- logical, and emotionally charged—an entity inextricably related to and formed by its environment.
A profound sense of caducity and ephemerality runs all through her ceramic compositions. Drawing on the eschatological symbolism of medieval frescoes and tapestries, she trasposes these visible codes into clay—a medium that, in its fragility and resilience, mirrors the physique’s personal pressure between vulnerability and endurance. As Heidegger identified Cartesian dualism as a root of contemporary alienation, Proudfoot as an alternative channels his notion of “Being as Embodied In-the-World”—a state of fluid reciprocity between self and environment, the place existence unfolds by care, use, and sensory engagement.
Wounds and scars etched into these kinds evoke the trauma of separation—not solely betwe- en thoughts and physique, however between the human microcosm and the bigger net of interdependence on which life depends. But the crimson threads that traverse these fissures trace at the potential of mending this primordial rupture, expressing a perennial human eager for deeper existential that means by reconnection with one thing past the fleeting residing second.
Some works even recommend parallels between the human physique and pure buildings, envisio- ning a transformative integration with crops and different life kinds in a hybrid state of natural continuity. This reimagining of the physique positions human existence as seamlessly embedded inside a residing ecosystem—shifting past each anthropocentric views and the alienating cut up between physique and soul. Instead, Proudfoot invitations a extra holistic understanding of life, the place transformation and symbiosis turn out to be elementary circumstances of being.
By means of her chosen medium, Proudfoot engages with the inherently alchemical strategy of ceramics—an elemental transformation that deepens the inquiry into the connection betwe- en thoughts and physique. Clay turns into a primordial software that binds human intelligence and inventive impulse to pure matter, permitting thought and vitality to be transmuted into kind.
By means of this twin alchemical and physiological strategy, Proudfoot reveals the physique as a website of continuous dynamic negotiation—between gesture and notion, sensation and expres- sion, materiality and meaning-
—Elisa Carollo
Curated by
Elisa Carollo
at Fondazione Sandra e Giancarlo Bonollo per l’arte contemporanea, Vicenza
till August 30, 2025
