PERMANENCE AND FRAGILITY
The artist has used different techniques and mediums over time.
She began experimenting with fused glass in 2000 after working in ceramics for years.
Glass is thousands of years old, but J H-Botquelen’s experiments revealed its unexpected mutant temperament in her sculptures and wall reliefs by developing a pâte de verre technique. The versatility of glass has always invited alchemy, hybridisation and the infusion of different substances to obtain multiple personalities.
The artist likes to work on a same concept with different mediums and approaches to express different sensitivities.
Jacqueline H-Botquelen operates through her art as an archaeologist of the human psyche. Opposite to polished, brand-new objects, her creations appear like excavated or recovered from some distant sites in the artist’s unconscious.
Each artwork had already lived a life that has modified its structure, leaving it with a story to tell. These objects are more brought back to life than they are freshly created. Using fused glass, Botquelen achieves an uncanny overtime effect as memory’s remnants of humanity itself.
Like the French philosopher and art critic, Louis Marin proposed in 1989, the storia occurs in modern representation, from the articulation between reflexive opacity and transitive transparency. JHB oscillates effortlessly between them with graceful proficiency. In a pilgrimage through the opacity of memory, these mysterious fragments of consciousness become metaphors of the path Botquelen follows; it is a search for the ultimate essence of her art, materialized in the sophisticated manipulation of millenarian materials in an attempt to resist fading into oblivion.
Veronica Cuomo, Curator (Art-Essay on Jacqueline H-Botquelen’s artwork)
The common thread in each series comes under the theme
“PERMANENCE AND FRAGILITY”, constant dialogues between figurative and abstract narratives, with painting and sculptures in metal, glass and paper on canvas.