Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s large-scale, tactile sculptures occupy a place of possibility between abstraction and figuration, exploring the parameters and constraints of the human body. With an approach as formal as it is political—merging exploratory form with social practice—she considers the creation of “new forms [as] a mission…a way of not reasserting the world as it is, but of positing a transformation.” Using her own body as a tool and often working from the inside out, Cerqueira Leite shares control with the material, digging, scratching, and pushing her way through clay and plaster to produce strikingly original works that double as “indexes of movement.” The resulting forms, which retain imprints and impressions of her legs, arms, and fingers, resemble skeletal structures, bodily organs, or hybrid artifacts with only a residual relationship to the human. Like Cerqueira Leite’s drawings and videos, her sculptures engage moments “in which bodies exceed their material, socio-political and cultural containers, becoming disintegrated in all senses of the word.” The new complexities that she achieves transcend physical boundaries.
Jonathan Goodman: You were born in the United States, but then your family moved to Brazil, where you grew up. While studying at the Chelsea College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, where you earned your MFA in sculpture, you lived in London, and now you are in New York. How did these places influence your image-making? Did the different styles of education in Brazil and London also affect you?
Juliana Cerqueira Leite: My parents moved back to Brazil when I was an infant, at the tail end of a long military dictatorship. The economic turmoil meant growing up in a very violent city, witnessing a lot of financial struggle and inhuman destitution, but also rapid transformation, and these experiences informed my interests. . .
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