I feel inspired by my surroundings.
By a hike in the mountains, or in the countryside.
The contemplation of this nature feeds me.
My studio is in the heart of these landscapes,
...just by opening the door,
I step outside with the hundred-year-old trees growing all around me.
It's my food, my visceral need.
I'm not a city girl at all,
but 100% rural.
Painting is my basement.
I enter into it, like you enter into a landscape.
Sometimes I step on it, my feet touch the canvas.
It's not a painting conceived on an easel, it's a painting about...
the ground-soil in contact with the ground itself.
I feel attached to it. The canvas emerges as a ground witness.
I only use water-based paint.
It's natural and dries fast. Depending on the effect
I'm looking for, I put it outside, in the sun, or even in the rain.
The work is treated,
sometimes even mistreated.
I feel the same physical investment when it comes to the dunging process.
I have to go out into the meadow to pick up the dung
and make sure I'm not attacked by the cows.
This moment is completely unsafe.
Why do I work with cow dung?
The approach seeks to put an eye on the animal mark
on the ground in our landscapes.
Cowdung reveals a relationship that humans have had with animals
from the moment they started farming.
The process to take the herd where the food is, called transhumance,
...was the starting point for my work with cow dung.
Cowdung offers a possibility of reconnecting us to a world
where humans were still closely linked to animals.
I observed that many everyday objects
in our society have lost the link to nature.
In particular, objects of over-consumption and communication.
Like a cataplasm, I started wrapping them in the second skin
of cow dung, to cure them of their ills.
A plastic candlestick for instance,
...a carafe from the 80s. Old telephones
...and typewriters that no one uses any more. I covered them with dung.
Once dried, I planted mosses and ferns
to illustrate a successful reconnection with the cycle of life that is being established.
There's a certain beauty in this upgraded excrement.
Each object is a small element in a larger, ever-expanding whole.
Thanks to the objects that have been given in each place where the banquet is shown,
the composition aims to grow and become a monumental work
Porcelain is rightly called the material of humility,
because you spend hours, weeks or even months
recreating a shape through moulding.
But when it comes out of the oven,
there’s almost always disappointment.
There's no such as perfection with porcelain.
That's why porcelain is such a good school for life.
For the porcelain roots, I felt driven by a French proverb :
which says "to eat the dandelion by the root" in the sense of being buried
and fertilising the soil.
For a year, I took roots from my village cemetery, in the plant waste bin,
where I found this beautiful root.
I was interested in its regular shape.
It required a particularly complex mould with 9 sub-pieces.
I moulded around a hundred roots of different sizes in this way.
It sounds simple enough, but each little root becomes a larger
or smaller cube of plaster that ends...
up occupying my whole space.
The principle of plaster moulding is
to reproduce a given shape
which is filled with slip, liquid porcelain,
and fired at 1000 degrees.
There are plenty of surprises
when the works come out of the oven, sometimes negative ones, too.
The porcelain roots can be fixed vertically on a wall,
or placed level with the ground. Each time their whiteness is an incredible eye-catcher.
Porcelain is a journey into the earth, on the surface and
in the darkness of the ground to look at what is happening...
as close as possible to the earth's crust.
Painting reduces to the second dimension,
but I feel to explore space through installations.
The means by which the artist uses to express such as painting, installation or performance,
take another look at his work and sometimes reveal an aspect of his own history.
The aim of taking the metro with my body covered in clay,
was to observe passenger's reaction deeply immersed in their daily lives.
But unexpectedly there wasn't any ! I was given an indifferent welcome.
I had to take it out on myself to accept being in such
a crappy condition. All that effort for this ?
The idea behind was also a shamanic walk
of the earth woman walking
through the guts
dug into the ground by the metro.
The clay on my face and all the body was coming
from a small waterfall in the heart of my village.
I dived into the water to scrape the clay from a vein just behind
the curtain of the waterfall. Then I took it to Paris in a small bucket by high-speed train.
The significance of the performance is in the origin of the clay from my village.
Re-seeding the soil of major capitals,
trapped in urban construction, with clay from the provinces.
The country bumpkins bringing the city back to life.
It's a symbolic challenge
to honor the peasants feeding our society!