Ayline Olukman

Palm's Mirror - a Californian reflection of palm trees in a pool

2022

Ayline Olukman is a multimedia artist whose work addresses the notion of intimacy, solitude and wandering, resulting in photography, painting, writing, etching and drawing. She was born in Strasbourg, France and graduated with an MFA from L'École des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg (ESAD) in 2005. "Maintaining my quest for wandering is a quest in itself. I have come to admit that the issue of displacement is central to my work. A non-place common to everyone. For a long time, in this relation to nostalgia, I was in the disenchantment of this time that nothing holds back. Then I realized I was wrong. The image is just an image but it has a real status; it exists by itself, which causes a certain imbalance. My study focuses on the process of creation itself, the search for meaning belonging to the world and to the body through memory. The limit of the skin is an intimate and yet universal geography that is the red thread of my work, a game of putting in damage where the notion of scale or reality is lost. I see my images: these inner/outer landscapes as the place where body and nature meet, negotiate their differences and similarities. I think it’s important to stay in touch with the elements, the nature or the road, but also that we cannot clearly identify them. I need to encompass things without their limitations. The more I entered into the desire to understand myself, the more I became aware that I was part of a whole. The gaze is solicited in a continuous exchange between the outside and the inside, the reflection of the mirror is a hand extended to the viewer."