Marie Julia Bollansée
Art perfomance
Sculpture
Marie Julia Bollansée (°1960) is a multi media artist born and based in Belgium, she studied sculpture. Her oeuvre is a stream of performances, sculptures, spatial installations, photographs, videos and writings that express the power of life. In precise aesthetic forms, she exposes underlying driving forces in society. Sculpture plays a significant role in this, but so does the ritual presence of the artist, who transmits information like a medium.
She recently manifested performances in Japan, Koga City Museum of History and Tokyo 3331ArtsChiyoda, S.M.A.K. Ghent (BE), Bruges (BE), Nepal, Kathmandu Triennale, MuHKA Antwerp (BE) and Biennale of Women in Art, Brussels (BE). Her work has featured in many gallery and museum exhibitions in Belgium and abroad.
Bollansée regards her numerous travels and residencies as a form of research that helps her develop new ideas and discover fresh materials. She therefore borrows elements from Indian, Icelandic, English, Japanese and Italian literature, myths and poems, as well as those of her own village. Marie Julia Bollansée defined a blue that she calls a sign of our times: ‘Tarpaulin blue’. Blue tarpaulins, which she noticed in Mumbai, she gives meaning to. As a universal emergency solution and primary shelter, they simultaneously depict man’s vulnerability and self-reliance in today’s world.
LABYRINTH
We remember the Greek labyrinth on Kreta, where the murderous minotaur was locked up. Nobody came out alive, except Theseus who conquered the minotaur helped by his love Ariadne.
In Chartres, the circular labyrinth on the cathedral floor invites the solitary walker on a spiritual pilgrimage. The Labyrinth created by Marie Julia Bollansée has a special quality, thanks to the help of her mother who knitted the paths in pure white sheep’s wool. The paths meander between islands of blue tarpaulin. The artist invites the audience to walk this Labyrinth barefoot!
PROSTHESES
Sculpture, 2017, edition of 49
blue tarpaulin, sheep’s wool, blue rope, carabiner, plexi box, 440 x 375 x 130 Mit Hendrickx, my mother, knitwork.
A prosthesis makes possible what one cannot do without it (anymore). It transforms the user into a cyborg with extended aspects.
This sculpture contains four prostheses, a pair to put on your feet and a pair for your hands. They are knitted in pure sheep’s wool by an old and wise lady.
Along the construction process the lady made them to be powerful devices, as she embedded in them her devotion and care. When you are equiped with these prostheses, you have the power to step into a zone of tenderness and compassion.
After some exercise you don’t need these devices anymore, as humaneness becomes your natural state of being. You can preserve the prostheses fastened into the blue tarpaulin as a back-up.
