Solanne Bernard lives and works in London where she received an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 2020.

The Paris-born artist works predominantly with ceramic sculptures, merging the imagery of abstracted body parts and plants into hybrid sculptural forms. This hybridisation of natural beings takes on alien qualities to form mythological bodies, highlighting the roles fluidity and the intertwinement of things have in constructing a sense of unease and visceral displacement.

Influenced by Donna Harraway’s belief that ‘we are all cyborgs’, Bernard’s works are trapped in a parallel world where the fusion of beings acts as a new method of survival. In their otherworldliness, they become reflections of a utopia – an interspecies cross-pollination that act as catalysts to question our very existence in this world without the need for destruction.

Oscillating between a dystopian past and a mythical future, their forms reverberate as timeless beings, dipping in and out of abstraction and familiarity to mirror the possibilities of metamorphosis. The artwork becomes the ‘other’ onto which we can project our own estrangement from ourselves and act as a channel for our fears and discomforts, transforming them into strange and absurd new beings with their own subjectivities – finding ways to act out the complexities between desire, violence and disgust.

Solanne Bernard’s practice is an ode to mutation – the strange moment in between dissolving what once was and the fantasy of a new type of existence. The process of transformation is crystallised in hardened ceramic, failing to continue growing into its next state.

Like mythical creatures, sculptures will live as long as we keep talking about them. If we stare at them long enough maybe they will begin to move again.

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SELECTED DATES
2025 • The Luster, Vitruta x Display Fever, London
2024 • The Fire, Metamorphika, Display Fever, London
2024 • Beauty In Chaos, Hew Hood Gallery, London
2024 • The Way of All Flesh, Saatchi Gallery, curated by Delphian Gallery, London
2023 • Can I Steal Your Body? Trilogy: Borderline, ADH Gallery, London
2023 • Dentro, Somers Gallery, London
2023 • The Body, Dissolving, Studio Chapple, London
2023 • 2 FOR 1, Hypha Studios, London
2023 • Meat Market #1, London
2023 • Inverted Corneum, The Split Gallery, London
2023 • South Open, OHSH Projects, London
2022 • Iridescence, Alkinois, Athens
2022 • Finalist of the Ingram Prize, Unit 1 Gallery Workshop, London
2022 • Destructive Mollusc,  Staffordshire St Studios, London
2022 • Synthesis, Saatchi Gallery, curated by Delphian Gallery, London
2021 • Peach Fuzz, The Factory Project, London
2021 • Space Lapse, RCA graduation show, Royal Society of Sculptors, London
2021 • Fertile Laziness, Platform Southwark, London
2020 • Graduate show at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London

STUDIES
MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art (2020)
BA (Hons) Sculpture, Edinburgh College of Art (2015)