Long story short: From the wrecked carcasses of crashed cars, to the painters-bodyworkers and tuning experts of all kinds, to the creatures of sidelined popular countercultures—dismissed as too literal or deemed unworthy by pretentious distinctions—Naomi first engages with the invisible hands bound to the souls of objects. She questions these cast-offs through the shifts in meaning induced by the spaces that exhibit them, once these practices are displaced from their origins.

Her interest is sincere, fascinated, and deeply authentic—not just for what happens aesthetically, but because these practices transcend the dream, honoring it to the point of materializing it into reality. Monsters, monstrare, creatures. The kind that dwell in objects, that haunt us, finally made visible under her hands: the beast still growls under the hood, and the object is a skin, a molt before its emergence into the world.

Today, the full scope of her research remains ever-present, continuously contaminating space beyond the objects themselves. Her figures stand at the edge of the common-collective mass-culture, intimate chimeras in perpetual gestation within bodies, expressing themselves through the forms Naomi defines with acute precision—so much so that they seem on the verge of exorcising themselves from our imaginations, Alien-style. We are unwitting hosts to creatures that both produce and discard us, haunting us precisely because we ignore their effects.

Hands, a recurring motif in Naomi’s practice, first appeared as structures supporting other objects—much like the animal legs bearing the weight of bourgeois furniture. They seem to incarnate the very hands I once imagined as a child, reaching out from under my bed to clutch my throat. And yet, no previous representation had ever captured them as clearly as Naomi has brought them to life—these hands had already infiltrated our collective imagination, appearing only as negative spaces, as amalgamations of scattered details borrowed from both mainstream and niche cultural artifacts. None, however, were as faithful to our dreams as the hands of Naomi’s creatures. And like in the best horror films, these hands hint at a creature too mesmerizing to depict in full—just restrained enough to keep us from giving it a face, from bringing it to life, and risking seeing ourselves in it.

Hands, again, affirm the tangible reality of sculpture: they live. Naomi suggests that hands do not lie. They expose the tensions that place them at the heart of tenderness and touch, of torment, of weight and gravity, of time passing, of friction, grips, claws, the restfulness of embraces, the caress and the slap, the iron fist and the velvet glove porcelain, ceramic, glazes gleaming like fine-tuned cars.
And today, it’s the baby shower. An opportunity to linger over the characters coming to life on porcelain, offering us, in turn, mirrors of our own contradictions. The baby, the porcelain—fragility itself gestating the monster or birthing its innocence. Like magical girls: the magic takes hold, becomes real, seeps into the everyday, and imposes its own version of the world. A kind of powerful LSD.

Under the enchantment of objects lies an invitation to dream. A gymnastics of identification and resistance, stimulating our collective imagination beyond mere ceremonial contemplation. To keep dreaming, concretely—to transform the platform that gathers us today, shifting the social frameworks that bind us, and recognizing ourselves in representations beyond the roles assigned to us outside of this space. To allow ourselves to meet these living figures, to embrace their contradictions and the ambiguity of our wounds.

Through Naomi’s various characters, we are invited to accept our fundamental ambiguities—for in them lies our power to live, to dream, and to act. It is an invitation to savor, on our lips, the incomparable taste of our singular existences, and to fully embrace our own contradictions:

the truth of shadow and light
the truth of my solitude and my bond to the world
the truth of my freedom and my servitude
the truth of my insignificance and the sovereign importance of every living
being
of all living beings
the truth of life and death.

— Raphaëlle