2nd Prize Winner
Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award
Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2024
Ornélie
Title:
“Royal Widow”
Medium & Dimensions:
Polymer clay, acrylic paint, 27 x 20 x 20 cm
About the Artist
Since graduating from the GOBELINS school of animation in Paris, Ornélie worked as an animation artist on numerous European feature films. Drawing characters in volume led her quite naturally towards figurative sculpture, which she started to practice as a self-taught artist. At a crossroads between volume and illustration, through portraits of female characters Ornélie develops an atmosphere often surreal and romantic, sometimes dark and strange. She is influenced as much by classical painting, as from comics and illustration, cinema, animation, and literature. By playing on the codes of the cabinet of curiosity, her sculptures reflect her dreams of fantasized eras, as Gothic and Victorian visions. All her artworks are strictly one-of-a-kind, handmade in full polymer clay. Flowers, eyes, fabric, lace and embroideries are modeled with polymer clay, then hand-painted. Ornélie is happy to be at the start of her journey as an explorer of this modern material, which she hopes, combined with her ideas and technical skill, will allow her to explore her creative potential. She will continue to develop her work, playing with containers and floating effects, along with the modeling of fabrics and the render of materials, textures and patterns. She plans to make more ambitious pieces, while keeping the pop and surrealist spirit that she loves : challenging herself is largely the driving force behind her art.
“Royal Widow”: The king is dead. With her mourning dress, the queen wears the appropriate outfit, which contrasts with the color of her thoughts. With the glass dome (and the face) which can be rotated and thus allow the sculpture to be opened, I wanted the effect of surprise more striking and the idea more impactful. The creation of this piece was really the pretext to deepen my work on the modeling and painting of fabric, lace and embroidery, with this unique color for the black dress with a whole range of shades of matte and glossy effects.
