Alice Béra

Half-Floor – “It seems that the image of the house becomes the topography of our intimate being. Not only our memories, but also our forgetting is housed there.” (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1957)
The artist has an affinity for the overlooked spaces in a house. Those places freed from human presence, which dirties, cleans and tidies. Things are not forgotten but released into nature: cheese can harden like stone and wood calcifies.
Abandonment calls forth minerality; dust and the passage of time become the agents of this transformation.
The artist seeks an intermediate state of form, an impression of unfinished that calls for an imminent outcome. She invests the terrain of the non-specific, though there is a gradation in the scale of the unnameable: some sculptures convey clear image, while others summon a procession of indefinite impressions.
It is the journey the objects make as they emerge from the depths of these hidden corners that leaves a mark. The house is full of folds where apparitions take refuge, adopting the appearance of an ancient temporality. They are partially covered with a colored patina, imperfectly sanded and insufficiently hollowed out.