Buenos Aires-based Julia Padilla uses sculpture, installation, and performance to rethink the transformative potential of life and matter. Constantly exploring new territories, she sets the organic in dialogue with the artificial, juxtaposing unconscious creativity with reason to produce subtly unsettling hybrid forms that question traditional perspectives on the body, space, and perception while imagining new ways of being and co-existing in the world.
María Carolina Baulo: Material exploration gives shape to your work. How do you make your choices in tune with the concept of a work?
Julia Padilla: My artistic practice moves freely between sculpture and performance, seeking to expand the imagination and constantly reinvent form. I investigate the place of materiality and its capacity for transformation. Like an insect, I assemble fragments meticulously and intuitively, with agile and subtle movements. I’m drawn to surfaces and what their interiors reveal. I aim to unlearn conventional notions of form to discover new combinations through a dialogue with unfamiliar materials. I’m interested in the uncanny effect that arises from assembling obsolete everyday objects—a displacement that transforms them into something else. . .
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