Six questions for
Esther Babulik

How do you describe your own art practice?

I use wax and basketry as my primary materials. Basketry, a traditional technique of volumetric weaving, becomes here a skeletal structure for my sculptures. Wax, with its fluid and polymorphous nature, acts like skin and evokes the impermanence and plasticity of living organisms.

Together, these materials allow me to construct hybrid bodies caught in a state of permanent metamorphosis like entities in transit, suspended between forms. My sculptures inhabit a liminal space where nature and artifice, the human and the non-human, merge and blur into one another.

Which question or theme is central in your work?

What interests me are our limits shifting, blurred, often imposed. What defines our species, what still ties us to an animal past, what pushes us toward an augmented body. These dimensions don’t cancel each other out; they coexist, rub against each other, intertwine. Even if we reject our animal origins, we remain inhabited by archaic, instinctual drives, coexisting with our contemporary obsession with control and performance.

From birth, subtle mechanisms are set in motion: we’re assigned a gender, a role, a way of existing. Information is injected into us without our consent, almost without our awareness. Slowly, it starts to format us in our gestures, our desires, our relationship to others.

My work seeks to bend those lines, to mutate the forms, to blur the coordinates. I imagine bodies that are ambiguous, unstable, unruly. Identities that spill over, hybridize, refuse fixed archetypes. Where norms tighten, I carve out breaches.

What was your first experience with art?

Art wasn’t really present in my home, and I didn’t visit exhibitions as a child. However, my parents had an extensive collection of DVDs and introduced me to a wide range of films.

Cinema, especially science fiction, was my first significant artistic influence. I was captivated by films like Alien, with the character of Ripley, The Twilight Zone series, and the works of Cronenberg.

One film that particularly fascinated me was The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), where the protagonist, after exposure to a radioactive cloud, begins to shrink progressively. His wife, embodying a stereotypical housewife, builds him a dollhouse, and he must fight for survival against threats like spiders.

What is your greatest source of inspiration?

My greatest source of inspiration comes from the living world, like animal forms, strange or forgotten reproductive systems. I often start with entirely fictional, imagined images to explore modes of reproduction like parthenogenesis, ovoviviparity, or embryogenesis. What fascinates me is how a body takes shape, how genital organs appear, how an umbilical cord connects, nourishes, binds.

I’m also drawn to contemporary body transformations such as prosthetics, cosmetic surgery, extreme bodybuilding. These practices both captivate and unsettle me. They shape fabricated, hybrid bodies that become plastic starting points for my work.

What do you need in order to create your work?

I don’t need much. Some wire, wool, rope, wax, a hot plate, and weeks of patience. A good podcast about reptiles, evolution, or mythology usually keeps me company while I work. Natural light is essential, not just for the atmosphere, but to see the wax slowly transform into skin.

I like using simple tools and slow processes. They allow time to think, to shift, to let things emerge.

What work or artist has most recently surprised you?

It’s more of a rediscovery than a new surprise, but I recently revisited the work of Ivana Bašić. I first encountered her sculptures at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, and later at La Panacée in Montpellier. Her work gives me chills, it’s so sublime, almost unbearable.

The beings she creates look like vulnerable gods. They are beautiful, terrifying, and yet so fragile.