A single sculpture by French artist Julie Hamisky (b. 1975), serves as a gentle anchoring presence in the room. La Géante (2024) captures the contrasting delicacy and resilience of nature: a flower is cast in bronze, mid-bloom. The fresh poppy flower is enlarged to eight feet tall, towering over the viewer with its petals and heart retaining their original details, while the stem winds downward, balanced by three banana leaves, reflected in the woven marley flooring.
The collection and the space reflect this sentiment of bringing lightness into the cold of the winter, and of drawing out the beauty in the imperfections of nature. The collection also features commissioned pieces of wearable sculpture created by Hamisky using her signature technique of electroplating, a process which suspends the fragility of nature in time.
Hamisky’s work continues the trajectory set by her grandparent Claude Lalanne’s practice of electroplating, rooted in the natural world. Her work features flower and fauna; and in this commission she has worked with Ulla Johnson’s choice of flowers, celebrating her passion for handcraft and the natural world.
Why did you want to work with Ulla?
Ulla and I have a common playground, challenging gravity through shapes and colors. Those pieces are inspired by a same love for the flora.
What first drew you to Ulla Johnson’s work?
I was invited to celebrate the sculptor Ana Pellicer 2 years ago and needed a very special outfit, that’s when I met Ulla’s work, finding one of her goddess dresses. Then we met through P.K. Gallery and our collaboration started.
What new aspect of your process or aesthetic was Ulla Johnson able to bring out in you?
This collaboration was an immersion into Ulla’s world and it was a challenge to create a number of pieces in two months’ time since my process takes so long, from the fresh flowers she would choose to the final result to fit on a body. It was intense and very pleasant.
What is it about Ulla’s designs that you enjoy? do you feel you share a sensibility / ethos when it comes to creating work?
Ulla’s designs make my mind wander, they move you to places, remind you about people and deeply connect you to a colorful organic vocabulary. We are both seeking beauty in every corner without respite and we try to articulate this enthusiasm into our processes and creations.
There is such beauty in the fragility of nature. what drives you to capture it and suspend it in time, as you do (and so poetically)? Do you also see joy and beauty in decay?
It’s always a confrontation to preserve the body of a flower before it collapses. You never really know what electroplating will give you as a result and at a certain moment whatever state is your subject the result would always be a surprise. Sometimes decay would emphasize a proper characteristic, forcing the line or making it something else, bringing another lecture.
Talk me through what it means to be an artist today, in relation to how this might differ from when your parents, and grandparents, were doing it.
If we would compare the artistic practice of our elders with today we would talk about the changes in society, how individualism has taken advantage on the collective. The impact of technologies today that didn’t exist in the ‘50s, ‘60s, the constant flow of images we are bathing in today, and how romanticism was a transforming tool of a post war chaos reality within great humor and constant poetry in everyday life.