PRESENTATION: Julia Bondesson-Cradle My Bones

Julia Bondesson combines aesthetics with psychology in her works. Bodies and body parts, charged with both beauty and melancholy, are recurrent features. The carefully carved and chiselled sculptures, with occasional scorch marks, have an exposed and vulnerable quality. Gently, they take possession of the room, like entities seemingly at rest.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive

For the last couple of years, Bondesson has experimented with individual sculptures representing singular emotions. A vocabulary has formed that helps her circle, comprehend, investigate and dissect the sustainability of a specific emotion. An archive of signifiers has slowly evolved to an operating language where older and new works interrelate. Julia Bondesson in her solo exhibition “Cradle My Bones” presents several new works and different aspects of her artistry: wood sculptures, videos and paintings and the video work “Cradle My Bones”, which gave the exhibition its name. Julia Bondesson explores the symbiosis between body and soul. Her inspirations include Chinese philosophy and embodied cognition, where development is furthered through active cooperation between the senses and the physical body. With performative works, the artist takes an animistic approach, blurring the boundary between object and subject. Bondesson refers to the performative action and her collaboration with the sculptures as “a dance” that gives rise to an intimate and emotional relationship between them. The sculptures become ambivalent characters – both objects and living beings – vessels travelling between the static and active states. In theatre, dance and the opera scene the human fate and our actions are portrayed with the body as a steppingstone, in the same way as the sculptures of Bondesson. During the pandemic we have been robbed of the opportunity to gather and enjoy these motions. The sculptures function as a cure, a medicine as they create scenes in the physical world. The works speaks for themselves, their meaning revealed in the visual experience. “Science, Order, and Creativity” is a legendary book by the physicists Bohm & Peat (1987). In it they seek to dissolve the petrification within technology and science, that in some cases do more harm than good, and they describe the need of a new creativity as the remedy. The human creativity relieves us all from the crisis. Bondesson refers to this book as she strives to return to motion as a counterweight to the petrified. Wholeness is emphasized rather than fragments, it is time for a new paradigm with a profound meaning in contrast to completely surrendering to technology. Bondesson have studied at a puppet theatre in Taiwan. You can sense this in the sculptures, as the tone unfold a sanctity which celebrate the body as an essential instrument for harmony, rather than being secondary to intellect.

Photo: Julia Bondesson, Cradle My Bones (Video still), 2021, Photo: Alexander Wireen, © Julia Bondesson, Courtesy the artist and Moderna Museet

Info: Curator: Andreas Nilsson, Moderna Museet, Ola Billgrens plats 2-4, Malmö, Sweeden, Duration: 23/10/2021-30/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.modernamuseet.se