Press release
Entering Tïa Calli Borlase's world is entering an uncommon environment of objects in which the artist creates "unique three-dimensional arrangements", according to the art critic Paul Ardenne, made from re-thinking and re-assembling everyday materials into a metaphoric re-use.
Made with very personal material elements derived from lingerie, such as bra cups, ribbon, intimate fabrics and corset stays, the sculptures have unusual and ambiguous forms that may appear suggestive or subliminal, and derive from successive iterations and hybridizations.
Objects of desire, Tïa Calli Borlase's sculptures, are relate with the human or animal body. Entitled "sculptures membranes", these works exhibit sensation-body, emotion-body, and anatomic-body. They alternate between heaviness and lightness, balance and imbalance, presence and absence, symmetry and strangeness, suffering and seduction.
In this plastic work that plays with textile creation, the needle becomes an obsession. The technique of sculpture created by sewing deals with entwinement, attachment, weaving, combining, mending, and delicate caring. All of these actions are allegories for human relationships and experiments of desire in the act of creation itself.
Behind the quest of desire is a search for intensity, a concept that the artist found in moving and travelling. Thus her first artistic experiments occurred with ephemeral hanging sculptures in clandestine locations such as temples or archaeological sites in Uzbekistan and Angkor.
To show the sculptures in suspension means to express a balance between a reality that may look frivolous and its hidden significance. The way the artist assembles the forms, and circumscribes corporal elements has an evident erotic aspect.
Moreover, sculptures as objects of desire question the links between masculine and feminine. The combination of some forms and their complements suggest some affective links - attachment, enslavement, subjugation, permutation, inversion - all kinds of forms derived from emotion. Using the same process the artist makes equine sculptures. An excellent rider, Tïa Calli Borlase is very fond of this powerful and yet fragile animal. In addition to her sculpture of horses created from lingerie or leather, she also creates living sculptures, dressing the animal with sumptuous "caparaçons" that she sews herself.
In all her works, which also include photography, Tïa Calli Borlase keeps pursuing a consistent artistic world, thus developing what Gilles Deleuze would call her "geography of desire".