For as long as she can remember, Ornélie has been drawing princesses! Cinderella and Snow White no longer had any secrets for her! After her schooling, she went to live in Paris and obtained her advanced diploma in visual communication and graphic design, then continued her studies by joining the prestigious Gobelins school.
Indeed, it was at Gobelins that Ornélie consolidated her drawing and progressed quickly thanks to sustained practice and rigorous training with the best drawing artists. Since her diploma, she has worked as an animation artist on numerous European feature films as well as on numerous short film and commercial projects.
Visualizing the characters in volume for the cartoon naturally pushed her towards sculpture, which she then practiced as a self-taught artist. In fact, she finds in these two practices a similar requirement in the work of poses and morphology, the character of the characters, their identity, their history. Modeling gives it the plastic and tactile side that it lacks with drawing. She recently moved from clay to polymer, and it’s a revolution for her. By exploring this innovative material, she realizes that it offers the freedom she was looking for: she can now go where certain classic materials did not allow her, deploying all her ideas and her creative potential.
Recently, she won the “Poet Artist Prize” in the Art Renewal Center competition, she is a finalist for the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, and her work is selected for the LunarCodexProject. She was also asked by the director of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine to exhibit at the “Modern Eden Gallery” in San Francisco, by the “Naia Museum” and the Museum of “Les Arts Ludiques” in France: all perspectives which seemed very encouraging and stimulating to her.
ARTIST STATEMENT
At a crossroad between volume and illustration, it is through portraits of female characters that I like to develop an atmosphere often surreal and romantic, sometimes dark and strange. I am influenced as much by classical painting (pre-Raphaelite, romantic, art nouveau, surrealism, pop art), as by comics and illustration, cinema, animation, and literature. By playing on the codes of curiosity cabinets, my sculptures are as many paths towards my dreams of fantasized eras, as many Gothic and Victorian visions.
As a figurative sculptor, it is important for me to leave the viewer the freedom to appropriate the story of the artwork from the elements I provide (in the pose, the look, the clothes, the colors, etc...). This story will be the one you want to imagine. I like that those who look at my work can fantasize and have the freedom to wander in their imagination, with their culture and their dreams.
All my artworks are strictly one-of-a-kind, totally handmade with polymer clay, including fabrics, laces, and eyes, and hand-painted. I am happy to be at the start of my journey as an explorer of this modern material I have found in the polymer clay, which I hope, combined with my ideas and my technical requirements, will allow me to deploy all my creative potential. I will continue to explore and develop my work around the ideas of playing with the container, with the inside/outside for example. But also on the floating effect, the work of modeling fabrics and rendering materials, textures, in the costumes, as well as the effects of transparencies, the laces, and the patterns. I plan to make larger and more ambitious pieces, while keeping the pop and surrealist spirit that I love: challenging myself is largely the driving force behind my art.
