THE WORLD OF KALUK
2020 to 2021 · Ben & Julia
A creature becomes a mythology
The World of Kaluk grew from character research into a complete visual universe. Ben & Julia developed Kaluk and the surrounding creature family through drawing, illustration, sculpture, costume, fabricated objects and installation, allowing the same fictional world to move continuously between two and three dimensions.
The gallery became one point inside that world. Characters were not presented as isolated designs but as beings with faces, materials, relationships and traces of a larger mythology. Research drawings and finished objects therefore belong to the same narrative process.
The characters enter the room
The finished sculptures brought Kaluk and Naruk out of the sketchbook and into the gallery at real scale. Fur, painted details, jewellery, masks and fabricated elements give the characters an immediate physical presence while keeping the strangeness of the drawings intact.
Installed at Mauer Gallery, the creatures became part of the architecture of the exhibition. Seen from inside the room and through the street-facing windows, they shifted between sculpture, character, stage presence and imagined species.
Faces, species and invented kinship
Kaluk belongs to a wider population of dogs, birds, hybrids and other beings. Some appear regal, some comic, some slightly unsettling. Their strong silhouettes and highly coloured features give each figure an immediate personality while keeping them visibly connected to the same world.
The recurring eyes, feathers, fur, masks and ornamental details work almost like a visual genealogy. A character can be read individually, but the pleasure comes from sensing that it also belongs to a much larger family that continues beyond the frame.
The world is built on paper first
Sketchbooks are where the mythology remains open. Proportions change, faces mutate and relationships appear before anything is fixed. The drawings show the project as a process of discovery, with design decisions developing through repetition rather than through a single final image.
This research stage is essential to Ben & Julia’s practice. Drawing is both a construction tool and a form of storytelling: it establishes anatomy, attitude and character before those ideas move into colour, fabrication and space.
Fabrication makes the fiction physical
The sculpted fish made for Kaluk’s throne shows how far the project extends beyond image making. Forms first explored through drawing become hand built objects, with modelling, surface, colour and material decisions all contributing to the identity of the world.
For Ben & Julia, fabrication is part of authorship. The handmade object carries the marks of its construction and gives the fictional mythology real weight, scale and texture when it enters the exhibition space.
Enquire about works
For documentation, works or a private viewing connected to The World of Kaluk, contact Mauer Gallery directly.