Casilda Oppe works between sculpture, installation, and drawing to build hybrid bodies shaped by intuition, material experimentation, and embodied memory. Across wood, resin, ceramic, and metal, forms emerge through processes of reproduction, disassembly, and reconfiguration. Rooted in a language of fragments, Casilda’s work moves between tactility and transformation—reimagining the organic as an active site of multiplicity, tension, and desire.

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Can you take us through the evolution of an artwork, from that first spark of inspiration to the finished piece? 

I often work across a variety of sculptural methods where the final installation is a combination of materials such as ceramic, steel, wood, plastic, and resin. Each work informs the next. On many occasions, I have started a piece from a drawing or through playing with clay. When I recognise a shape which seems to possess its own autonomy, I become interested in its multiplicity—its potential for reproduction and fragmentation. I explore these using digital sculpting techniques, such as digitally scanning the ceramic piece, cloning it and superimposing it. 

Then the sculpture is then returned to the physical realm as a 3D print and covered with wax, oils, resins, and wood stains, giving them a new skin. 

I find diverse expressions through methods of reassembling and rejoining. I work on a piece until it becomes a  stranger estranged to me. I’m drawn to the moment when the original sculpture transforms into something that feels as though it could breathe on its own.

The installation process is equally essential in my practice. New narratives appear when materials with diverse qualities are brought together. Once I begin to understand the relationship between a specific material and a physical form, I look for their point of connection. Through this dialogue, I manipulate both elements to create a symbiosis.

How do you reignite creativity during those inevitable periods of self-doubt or stagnation? 

Either take a few days break from the studio, or I decide to reorganise it so that it becomes a new space. I empty all my shelves and boxes and often, I come across old works that I didn’t pay much attention to when I first made them, and they bring me back to projects I had forgotten about.

Drawing is also an essential part of the moments when my hands seem to resist the intuitive forms that I found on clay. I try to draw in a way that the lines are made almost blindly, as Phyllida Barlow describes when she talks about drawing. Then I seek to rectify the form until it makes sense. 

As well I look for strange objects. These could be unusual jewellery at the local London antique markets and car boots, near where I live; or searching for bones and objects carried by the water to the shore of the river Thames.

These are also times when I walk a lot; in short, anything that makes me see or anything that can make me feel grounded.

Another way I reconnect is by turning to artworks I know well, familiar pieces that somehow feel different each time I see them, which evoke new sensations depending on the moment I found myself in. In London, where I live, there are three works I often return to. One is Jacob and the Angel by Jacob Epstein. It usually is at Tate Britain, but now it has disappeared and ~they can't tell me ~ its location is undisclosed.

How important is it for viewers to understand the intended message of your work? Does ambiguity add value, or do you seek clarity in your expression?

For me my works emerge as embodiments of very specific moments or feelings in their first shape, but once they evolve into a defined physical form they become idiosyncrasies that constantly reincarnate and self-reproduce depending on the viewer. There are very clear references in my work and they are expressions of ambiguous identities, but these change as they relate to themselves or to other materials. If you are looking for a concrete answer to my work from me, it is because you are not looking at sculpture. For me these organic figures exist in a dynamic circular state of change and contradictions.

How do you measure the impact of your work—by its reception, its personal meaning, or something else? 

I find it very difficult to measure the impact of my work. I enjoy the moment when someone bends down to look at your work, or has the need to touch or cradle it. When their body physically reacts to the sculpture, it is then that I have the feeling that the sculpture is no longer of my expression but that it belongs to the body with which it shares a space. I see my sculptures as organs that we recognise within ourselves but at the same time they are fully autonomous.

Can you pinpoint a single moment in your life when you realized art was not just a passion but your purpose?

I don’t believe that art was something I consciously chose, at least, not at first. During my Foundation year at Camberwell, I realised that my practice and spending time in the studio had become something I was deeply drawn to. I found real joy in the conversations happening in the studios; it became something fundamental to me. I knew I wanted to be part of the ongoing conversation around art, objects, and philosophy—and I found that in London. Later, when I started sculpting at university, I realised I didn’t want to be in a pathway without this kind of practice. You begin to develop a way of seeing and understanding the world that, in my opinion, becomes addictive. Once you build a language, a rhythm, and a routine in the studio, it starts to feel like an essential part of you. Since then, I’ve been continually discovering new ways to navigate it.

How do you reconcile the tension between raw, innate creativity and the discipline required to master your craft?

For me the two depend on each other, discipline and constancy is a fundamental part of the artist's practice, even though many of my works emerge from an intuitive state that I could refer to as innate creativity.I enjoy a lot the technique and knowledge that a practice like sculpture requires, each material is a world, and often when you start a project and start to know the material you visualize for the piece, infinite possibilities of execution arise, I personally enjoy taking advantage of that initial raw concept and expressing it in all possible ways through the techniques I am learning,I  really enjoy talking to and seeking advice from people who specialise in metal, wood, sound and who are not necessarily artists. Once  I start understanding the qualities of a material, I like to play around with it and use it in ways that are not always right, to see how they react with each other. Within my sculpture I like to play with the qualities of each material by using patinas and compositions, such as combining elements like PLA and metal. I try to create an illusion in which the delicate materiality of a scupture seems to be able to create a mark on a hard material like metal.

In my practice, I really enjoy the time it takes to create a sculpture. Each material requires specific tools, and I like taking the time to understand how to work with them. I appreciate both the methodical aspects of the process and the freedom that comes with more intuitive, unrestricted moments.

If you could communicate just one core message through your entire body of work, what would it be?

Currently my body of work is focussed on exploring the Interdependence of all bodies accentuating the mutability through an inherent vulnerability.  Simultaneously self-reproducing bodies which in relation to one another explore metaphors of desire, rebirth and threat scenarios that slowly reveal themselves in her installation as an endless anagram. Here fragmentation and self-reproduction become focal strategies to engage in gestures that destabilise subjectification.

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