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VESTIGE IV

Textile cast in bronce
17 x 10 x 5,5 cm
2026

This work is part of the series Solutio

Fragments of the artist’s garments, previously unstitched, are coated in wax and cast in bronze using the lost-wax technique. The procedure transforms an object associated with everyday use and with the social construction of the female body into a permanent sculptural form. Once dismantled, the garment loses its original function of dressing and containing the body, becoming an ephemeral mold whose disappearance is the very condition for the existence of the final work. Bronze thus fixes the trace of an absent object, registering folds, tensions, and voids where a body once was.

Within "Solutio", this sculpture operates as a gesture of identity self-construction through material transformation. Feminine identity does not appear here as an image or a biographical narrative, but as a process built through actions performed on matter: unpicking, coating, casting, solidifying. The lost-wax technique acquires a precise conceptual meaning, establishing a direct relationship between loss and permanence. The work proposes understanding the female body as a field of inscription where what disappears leaves behind a structure, and where memory is preserved not in the original form, but in its material trace.

Born from research developed during the GlogauAir Berlin 2024 Residency, this series explores the complexity of female identity in tension with social norms and technological advancement. Using her own worn clothing as primary material — garments charged with lived experience — Englebert builds a visual language that probes the layers of social conditioning and subjectivity that shape the contemporary female psyche.

© 2023  by Isabel Englebert Studio

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