Body Mass

‘Constellations of Us’ vessels, by Marine Julié and Rückl

- Rima Sabina Aouf

An orgiastic frieze of genitalia, limbs and mouths seems an unlikely subject for a 173-year-old glass maker to hand-cut onto its refined crystal tableware. Yet that is exactly what the Czech company Rückl did when collaborating with Switzerland-based artist Marine Julié for this year’s Handmade.

The resulting ‘Constellations of Us’ vases and cups feature what Julié calls ‘a farandole of bisexual beings’, their curvaceous forms melding into, grasping and probing each other. This imagery is a trademark of Julié’s. She often paints it on walls and rock faces – large-scale sites befitting a trained architect. Her forms tend towards the gender fluid, combining male and female traits alongside some traces of the animal. She’s frequently asked, ‘Why women with dicks?’

The answer is multilayered. ‘It’s a kind of representation of myself – it’s much easier to speak about desire by representing myself with a dick. Because as a woman, culturally, I’m not supposed to talk about it, I’m not supposed to have an active part in that kind of situation,’ she explains. ‘But there is also an element of mythology, fantasy and collective unconscious,’ she continues, pointing to the recurrence of non-binary or trans-everything figures in nature, history and folklore. She considers her work a ‘poetry of beings’ that appear as their most essential selves.