Ben & Julia
Moving image, painting, sculpture, installation and performance
World building as an artistic method
Ben & Julia work as a shared artistic authorship across moving image, painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Their practice develops characters, objects and environments as parts of larger fictional worlds, with storytelling moving freely from a painted surface to a film, a sculpture, a costume or an exhibition space.
The work is often playful at first contact, but the humour opens into questions of identity, projection, belief and the way images create their own mythology. A character is rarely only a character. It can become an alter ego, a symbol, a mask, a prop for a performance or the centre of an entire narrative system.
Characters become worlds
Projects such as The World of Kaluk show how Ben & Julia treat character creation as a complete ecosystem. Kaluk, Naruk and related creatures exist through sculpture, masks, installation, images and environments. They feel at once intimate and strange, like beings that could belong equally to a children’s mythology, a ritual object or an invented species.
This ability to move from a single figure to a whole visual universe is central to the duo’s work. Dogs, hybrid animals and recurring personas are never isolated motifs. They are fragments of a larger story world that can unfold across the room, the street, the camera and the object.
A practice that keeps changing medium
Ben & Julia have always treated technique as part of authorship. A project can begin with drawing or painting and continue through sculpture, fabrication, film, photography, sound or live performance. The change of medium shifts the point of view while the underlying world remains coherent.
At Mauer Gallery, that approach appears through both creature based installations and painted works. The room itself becomes a narrative device, allowing viewers to discover characters, signs and relationships progressively as if entering a story.
The World of Kaluk / Milestone
Two key exhibitions at Mauer Gallery show the practice moving from creature based world building to painting, character and installation inside the same artistic language.
Request a private view
For works, documentation or a private appointment around Ben & Julia’s artistic practice, contact Mauer Gallery directly.