‘je suis l’espace où je suis’
Lucia Bru
Lucia Bru (1970, Brussels) likes to receive guests at the studio, she tells me with a smile when I arrive at her door during the dog days of summer. Bru’s studio, her tenth in thirty years, is on the first floor of a former textile factory in Anderlecht, Belgium. Here, says Bru, is where her sculptures are at home. Here are her materials and her oven. Here she ‘resonates’ with the space. Here is also the place where, over the years, she has created her sculptural archive — her brolomie (‘bric-a-bracery’) as she puts it, with a note of self-deprecation. ‘It contains all the beginnings since I started sculpting, the origins, the departures,’ she says. Bru will sometimes return to a form from the archive years after. ‘Sometimes I rework, sometimes I modify, sometimes I rematerialise in other ways.’ For Bru, the archive functions like a library. She refers to it in terms of a concentration, a synthesis, a community of grouped objects, families of forms: ‘cubes, lines, stools, mirrors, graphite mirrors, porcelain mirrors …’
Lucia Bru’s sculptural work rests on her particular fascination for the tension between object and space, as well as her ongoing artistic research into our spatial experience. ‘Where are we? How does the impact that a place has on us translate into experience? How do we demarcate a space? The object, me and the object, the object in the space, me in the space, me and the object and the space … and how it all can fluctuate.’
The artist, known for her ‘abstract visual vocabulary with ge (…)
