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

She works predominantly on ceramic sculptures, merging the imagery of abstracted body parts and plants into hybrid sculptural forms. This hybridisation of natural beings takes on an alien quality to form chimera like bodies, highlighting the roles the fluidity and intertwinement of things have in constructing a sense of unease and visceral displacement.

Influenced by Donna Harraway’s notion that ‘we are all cyborgs’, Solanne Bernard’s works are like trapped in a parallel world where the co-morphing of beings acts as a new method of survival. In their strange otherness, these works become reflections of the utopia of inter-species collaboration and cross-pollination, and behave as catalysts to question our existence in this world without the need for destruction and obliteration.

Oscillating between a dystopian past and a mythical future, the sculptures reverberate as timeless beings, dipping in and out of abstraction and familiarity to mirror the possibilities of metamorphosis. The monster-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 a tragic mythical creature, the sculpture stays alive as long as we keep talking about it.


Maybe if we stare at it long enough, it will begin to move again – if it chooses to.

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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)