OFLUXO

Broken wing or fractured limb – uncertain profile, shadow of its own form – the work of Julie Maurin gestures us into a zone of layered eclipse and unsettling liminality. Wildfires leave haunting scars on the landscape; toxic waste ground holds lasting artefacts of the abandoned and prohibited. Ordinary objects to those who left or abandoned them, but incomprehensible, suspect, even threatening, to those who find them.

Originally salvage, Maurin begins with an urgent foraging which mimics the preservation of what has been wilfully or inadvertently rejected and deserted. The discarded and forgotten – the off-cuts – the desiccated and damaged are reconfigured. There is the suggestion of the uncertain and evolving from the earth. Each sculptural combination is an unexpected restoration of another world in which surprise and joy are reflected in the reach it offers. Gravity and inspiration, extravagance and constraint, move us beyond the normal place of perception and control. Hybrid forms of male and female, human and animal, organic and synthetic, emerge.

Maurin searches for and uses a range of traditional and unexpected materials from broken jewellery and used clothing, domestic appliances, human appurtenances, dried relics of the intertidal, and used and broken children’s toys. Perforated slate often establishes the structure while suggesting the horizontal and the vertical: the decoration of flooring and the sweeping flood, the upright measure of growth and lasting monument.