Celia de Villiers

The artworks of Celia de Villiers are derived from environmental triggers and cultural conventions.  They address the concept of the human body as a site of agency, idiosyncrasy, subjection, and postmodern identity politics.  These artworks are a wry, tongue in cheek comment on contemporary social issues such as the present climate of utopian modification and the denaturing of the living being.  Her most recent sculptures mirror the post-human existence fantasy where the magical and the technological become inseparable hybrids. 

Thus de Villier’s artworks consist of multiple techniques and materials.  She uses laser cutting, metal wrapped in hot glass that has been blown, cast and slumped.  She also creates sculptures in Perspex and casting resin which contain latent references to coagulation and dissolution.  These materials provide the conceptual underpinning for the opposites in her work. 

In her textile works, she weaves together latex, vinyl, fibres, yarns, wood, metal and glass resulting in rich surface textures which are often over-dyed using commercial and natural substances.  Her pencil, charcoal and mixed media drawings are artworks in their own right, but often serve as preparatory sketches for her sculptural works.

Her focus on the topics of neo-baroque exuberance, physical adornment and the sublime of ‘delightful horror’ comments on the fears, hopes and mysteries of the body.  With one breath the work speaks of an existential quest, with the next of neo-gothic, bizarre rituals and the abject human yearning for transcendence.  Like biological life, her fragile resin castings, glass artworks and drawings are mutations, never copies and sometimes marked by imperfections.  They speak of the vulnerability of the body in performance.  De Villiers believes that “Art is a conversation, an experiment between the spiritual and the physical.  But it’s not like science.  It is more philosophical, like alchemy”. 

In her academic research de Villiers has investigated the phenomenon of artists who subject the body to various painful processes in the quest for self-expression in order to communicate anxieties about social transformations and crises.  She came to the conclusion that artists break with social conventions and pose a challenge to conformity as a coping mechanism and a therapeutic attempt to express individual identity against the backdrop of the impositions of society.  De Villiers maintains that it is through the agency of a variety of media, fantasy, theatre and spectacle that artists overcome feelings of powerlessness. 

Her supposition is that art gives us the opportunity to reappraise the ambiguities, which surround us, and to give new meaning to them.  Through a close look at what artists satirically say about all of us as performers in the world, viewers come to a different understanding of the world and themselves.