Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Calcify, 2019, detail.

“Creating new forms is a mission for me”

Juliana Cerqueira Leite (1981) is a Brazilian artist based in New York, she is interested in the parameters of the body and the space that it creates; her large-scale, tactile sculptures investigate the abilities and constraints of the human body. “Creating new forms is a mission for me,” said Cerqueira Leite, “a way of not reasserting the world as it is, but of positing a transformation”. The artist’s sculptures testify to one’s ability to transmute the world around them. Using her own body as a primary tool, Cerqueira Leite digs, combs, scratches, and pushes through her materials —which include clay, latex and plaster— to create organic forms. Her sculptures retain impressions of the artist’s legs, arms and fingers and often resemble skin, bone and similarly corporeal matter.

Explaining her use of materials, Cerqueira Leite has said: “One of the reasons I use so much density of material is that I want to upset the status quo: the idea that matter is consistently subservient to our desires. I want to put myself in a position where matter is in just as much control as I am”.

An unique creative process

Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Climb, 2012.

Climb is one in a series of Juliana Cerqueria Leite’s works that is made using an unique fabrication process. The form is a cast of the space left in a large volume of clay which the artist has physically climbed upwards through.

The repetitive movements of her barely-clothed body creates a document of this movement in the clay, leaving decipherable impressions of her elbows, knees, feet and toes on the sculpture’s exterior.

This, in part, is Cerqueira Leite’s dispute against the notion that physical matter is subservient to the will of mankind. The powerfully visceral configuration of material eschews notions of space, time and traditional form; its gravity-defying structure is essentially a negative space made positive by the artist’s actions. With Climb, Cerqueira Leite enacts an investigation into limitations, the body and our relationship with matter.

Climb by Juliana Cerqueira Leite - Sculpture in the City London 2018. Courtesy by the artist and Sculpture in the City, City of London's Cultural Strategy.

Juliana Cerqueira Leite also uses drawing in order to register the body and its movements. The artist draws the same repeated gesture, overriding its original meaning. Reducing the scale of the gesture to the size of the paper, Cerqueira explores how the repeated action of separating something (Separate), spreading (Spread), knotting, unscrewing or scrubbing (Scrub), give place to strange scribbles or formal records that are reminiscent of the familiar shapes of human vertebrae, bones, or organs.