C A M I L L A B L I S S
London based artist Camilla Bliss graduated in 2021 from the Royal College of Art.
Research into symbols and motives from ancient narratives, specifically mythologies, form the core of her practice. Her work often diffuses the boundaries between life and death giving an ulterior perspective that death does not need to follow the dark garments of tradition, or the light veil of the living, but in fact these subjects are very much intertwined and open to the viewers interpretation.
Within the work the element of ‘play’ is very important to her, as her work evolves around imagination and experimentation, firstly drawing out as much as she can through her mental space, but then working with her hands to find a kind of dialogue between the materials and the processes. Playful decisions around colour, material and form allow Bliss to make specific cultural connections, whilst taking the viewer on a personal and potentially ambiguous journey. She is an artist who primarily works in sculpture, her work places importance on handmade processes and qualities. In this way, She utilises a wide range of materials such as ceramics, metalwork, glass, wood, textiles and 3D printing. Bliss does this through the use of a personal language of symbols.
Camilla tends to make things quite tactile as she wants people to get closer into the works and to touch them, she feels that bringing them closer to really noticing the material and to have that sensory experience or awareness of your surroundings, helps ground the viewer enhancing the tension between them and the ceramics ‘It’s like this grounding material that you can really get lost in but the same time your imagination moves away so you’re drifting between states. I think that’s important within the work’. Camilla’s artworks are sensory as well as tactile, falling into a dream space where things shift or where there’s a sense of transformation and where there’s potential for something. Which she hopes will come through.
There is a cyclical element with the work always revolving, intertwined with how we feel about things in our modern world. She likes to create attention between two elements.At the moment we are being almost forced to communicate so much to the ‘digital’ it feels like thinking of a language or how we use language, not necessarily verbal but with sensory touch. This is one aspect of her work that she feels is important - to enter into relation with a piece. Technology, specifically phones draw you into other worlds or port holes and the ‘Sirens’, which play an important role in her narrative, are known to be either historically mermaids or both harpies (half woman half bird) reflect the destructive and distracting nature of modern communication. She likes the way that destruction as a word is not necessarily seen as something that’s negative but positive in the form of creation and how you put things together.
The Guardian collection originated from ‘Guardians of Bliss’ a ceramic range with many relief faces embedded into the surfaces. ‘Bliss’ not only refers to the artist’s mother’s maiden name, but also to a state of perfect happiness or euphoria. They refer to both the artists deceased mother: Helen Bliss, and to the wellbeing of those alive. Starting as protective elements, these structures as she sees them are supposedly a protective kind of element, they’re not going to harm you.