Celia de Villiers — selected works

A single practice across sculpture, fibre, drawing, teaching, community and curation.

Explore the work

ArtworksSculpture, glass, fibre & drawing — the body, its myths and strange futures.Enter →ProjectsCuration, community embroidery & public-art projects across South Africa and Europe.Enter →ProfileBiography, full curriculum vitae, publications & contact.Enter →

Artist’s statement

Celia de Villiers makes work about the body — its myths, its fragility and its strange futures. Drawing on ancient stories and post-human fantasy, she conjures hybrid, otherworldly figures — sirens, cyborgs and shape-shifters — that inhabit the unstable territory between the organic and the artificial, testing ideas of embodiment, identity and transformation.

She moves freely between materials and techniques: laser-cut metal and hand-blown glass, resin and Perspex, and richly textured textiles woven from latex, vinyl, fibre, wood and glass, often over-dyed by hand. Her drawings stand on their own and also feed the sculptures.

By turns playful and unsettling, she explores adornment, masquerade and ritual — and, more recently, ecological concerns such as hydropolitics, wildfires and mycology.

Making, teaching, mentoring, curating and research are, for her, not separate pursuits but one continuous practice. As she puts it: “Art is a conversation, an experiment between the spiritual and the physical — not like science, but more philosophical, like alchemy.”

— Celia de Villiers

 
Back to top ↑