Elisa Braem. We Meet in the Night

“We Meet in the Night” invites us to enter into the sculptural world of Elisa Braem, characterised by experimentation with clay and glaze, combined in this project with wood and metal. Her work with these materials includes animal, botanical and human shapes, which co-exist with natural and architectural features, a symbiosis that refers to a human approximation to our surroundings.

With a practice deeply bound to philosophy and language drawing from poetry, along with artistic references from a variety of eras, Braem is interested in those coalescing spaces and features that bring us together beneath the very same sky. The night acts as a meeting place, its darkness transporting us to a state of nature that is paradoxically more human, open to transformation and to a wild, permeable consciousness.

The sculptures in the exhibition are presented as extensions of this very consciousness, expressing the artist’s interest in universal entities like the sky, nature and light. With her practice, Braem enlivens a dialogue between human fascination for the universe, the importance of penumbra in painting and the fragmentation of a territory subject to the human gaze, shifting these subject areas over to her material work. These observations are codified into figures that bring the earthly domain closer to the universal, with shapes similar to birds, mountains or the infinity symbol.

Braem’s gaze also impacts the pictorial and philosophical tradition of landscape. The work with clay brings home the notion that the material comes from specific sites—the mountain, sediments, earth—and to a certain degree returns to them. Aware of how the human gaze over the land blurs the frontiers between culture and nature, Braem does not create works about the landscape, working instead on the process of becoming the landscape.

This sense of construction and transformation accompanies the artist in the conception of works, as well as in their production. Thought flows between reading and drawing, between writing and ceramics, between concept and gesture. Clay is not just a material but a sedimentary metaphor: a register of accumulated time, of decisions and indecisions, of interacting forces. A contemplative attitude that binds artistic practice to a way of inhabiting the world.