Loulou Siem’s artistic practice centers around a distillation of raw, human experience, alchemy and magic, and a reassessment of value systems. Working chiefly in sculpture to create immersive spaces, the work finds its place between comic, tragic and always macabre to some degree. She is concerned with the mortality or immortality of the inanimate and how this relates to the authenticity of human experience.
Within Loulou Siem`s art, found still in its early beginnings, jewelry plays an important role, interweaving between multiple and fluid functions, from ritual object to archaeological evidence, from decorative appearance to symbolic significance.
Loulou Siem’s jewelry is not designed to decorate concrete hands or cleavages, but to open the doors of perception towards a time freed from the small history, a time of primordial creation effervescence, which, in a repetitive and infinite multiplied manner, is found in the woman’s ability of giving birth, but also that of the artist of imagining new realities. The rings with human faces or the small ceramic portraits are merely pretexts for meditation on the memory of the species, on the liberation from profane time, and simultaneously, on the profound understanding that man is, until proven otherwise, the measure of all things, in the absence of which all the universe is merely an amorphous quantum mass waiting for an observer.
The artist places her pieces within “A pregnant woman wishing her child to be beautiful must look at beautiful objects” exhibition, which was on view at the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum Pavel Șușară, in November 2019. Loulou’s pieces were aligned in a well-calculated procession, in a millimeter-measured order made with a compass and a rule, thus establishing the parameters of a reality where human presence was abolished by geometric inventory.
The message of human absence (and therefore the absence of error) is repeated among the exhibition spaces through the intentional lack of direct connection with the exposed works. They appear to be created by a non-human conscience, one liberated from the millennial aesthetic rigidity of a hedonistic society. Sculptures made with rough construction materials stand in clear opposition to the fine texture & modeling of the ceramic or of the golden metal jewelry.
Loulou Siem studied at the Camberwell College of Art and The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. She was a studio manager for world-renowned painter Harold Ancartin in New York and Los Angeles. Later, she was invited to show her work in Beijing, London, Florence and Texas. Loulou Siem was preselected for the Red Mansion Art Prize and the Wells Art Contemporary awards and also participated with her visual works to the Jerwood award in Aldeburgh.
More about Loulou Siem & her exhibition here.
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Text by Dalina Bădescu.
