Delphine BalleyFigures de cire

Figures de cire is a journey through time and the vernacular, built around a set of three films and fifteen photographs made in camera, completed by a new sculptural work. Through a study of rites of passage, the artist probes the representation and dysfunction of social theatre. The whole is constructed as a lacunar narrative, in which the closed-door family portrait, the tradition of genre painting, still life and the iconography of ruin – that of the physical body as much as that of the social body – meet.
Through the construction of her own inventory of beliefs, Delphine Balley stages the social heritages and symbolic uses of places, from the cradle to the grave. The space of the domestic, omnipresent in her work, allows her to think of the image in different planes, evoking the temporalities of the narrative. The décor, in the films as much as in the photographic work, has a structural role: like an architecture of intimacy, it contains the rigidity of the family place, literally rendering the discomfort of positioning oneself.
Nourished by themes of pretense, metamorphosis and disappearance, these associations that materialise our inner worlds call upon both psychoanalysis and Surrealism. This bilingual book, rich in illustrations, will also include texts by Agnès Violeau and Chantal Pontbriand, curator and Canadian art critic, as well as an interview by the artist with Melanie Pocock, curator at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.