Holding and Passing – A Writing Exercise

Over the last few months, while researching for the critical publication, I’ve come across the work of several prominent female artists whose practices resonate with Belén Uriel’s. In the next few blog posts, I plan to explore her work in conversation with theirs, primarily as a way to develop my own writing.

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In my past conversations with Belen, she would mention how her work had a focus on the body. Glass, silicone, and mesh allow her to create the ergonomics of chairs, the proportions of folding screens, and the reach of handles that resist their original purpose. More so, how she reimagines their functional purpose through materials that alter their weight, texture, and transparency. The results are objects that seem to anticipate contact or movement, but are no longer bound to a single use. Her work examines how designed structures shape bodily experience and, in turn, how the body leaves its imprint on the objects it engages. We see a similar engagement with the work of Charlotte Dualé.

Dualé centers on ceramics and porcelain, producing forms that balance both strain and support. In works such as Be my body III (2023), slender white ceramic stands tower over the viewer, coupled with steel armatures that stabilize their height. They recall prosthetics or spinal columns, quietly recording the effort it takes to stand. In Contorsion I (2023), glazed porcelain rotates in on itself, giving sculptural form to the mechanics of twist and resistance, resembling a body in turn. Her work operates within a vocabulary of constraint and support, describing how the body is shaped by the forces that hold it in place.

Uriel’s practice prioritizes permeability over permanence, yet her focus on the body remains explicit. Untitled (braço) (2017) isolates the curve and length of an arm, translating its musculature and reach into a hollow form of blown glass. The work suggests both extension and vulnerability, as the fragility of the material resists the physical force the shape implies. Untitled (torço) (2017) abstracts the core of the body into a shell-like structure, its hollow interior and translucent surface reducing the solidity of the torso to an outline of presence. Both works strip the body of its flesh and weight while preserving its essential contours, creating objects that read as anatomical yet remain open and permeable. In doing so, Uriel recasts the body not as a fixed or closed system but as a form subject to light, movement, and external pressure. Across these works, the body is understood as adaptable and responsive, defined as much by its contact with objects and environments as by its internal structure. Where Dualé captures a body held in tension, Uriel imagines one in continual passage, moving through and shaped by the thresholds that surround it.

Both artists share a concern for the structures that mediate embodiment. Dualé’s ceramics articulate the forces of posture and compression, registering the body as a vertical system under pressure. Uriel’s glass, mesh, and molded forms trace the thresholds and intervals through which the body moves. One holds, braces, and resists. The other guides, filters, and adapts. Like Uriel, Dualé works within a material tradition that is historically tied to the domestic. Ceramics, with its associations to vessels and interiors, becomes in her hands an architectural prosthetic for the human form. Uriel’s materials, drawn from both industrial design and craft processes, dissolve the boundary between object and environment. Together, their work shows how domestic and design languages can be reconfigured to address the body not as a static form, but as a site of negotiation between movement, environment, and the systems that shape them.

Both artists invite close, sustained looking, as their works reveal more through an extended encounter. Dualé’s use of repetition and serial form builds a rhythm of vertical and compressed elements, each variation reinforcing the sense of weight, stability, and the physical demands of support. The density of ceramic and the structural reliance on steel armatures make the body’s relationship to gravity, posture, and endurance visible. By contrast, Uriel’s attention to softness, transparency, and open structure offers a counterpoint in which form is not about bracing or withstanding pressure, but about guiding, filtering, and adapting to the movements that pass through it. Her works read as thresholds rather than barriers, points of passage rather than points of fixation.

Viewed together, their practices outline a spectrum between holding and passing, between the body as anchored and the body as in transit. If Dualé’s work captures the strain of being held in place, Uriel’s charts the possibilities of movement through open and mutable forms. Together, they suggest that the body is never entirely static or entirely free, but exists in an ongoing negotiation between containment and passage.