In the beginning was a playing child
Playing with food is one of the memories I have retained from childhood. The pleasure I derived from peeling a piece of fruit was often more exhilarating than that of eating it. And this is still the case today.
When you peel a piece of fruit, you think you know its shape and what its skin’s final silhouette will be after it has been peeled. Yet it is always surprising to see the result.
It was these observations that led me to base my work on the concept of “skin” as an autonomous plastic element.
What interests me in the concept of “skin” is its plasticity, its role as a boundary between inner and
outer worlds, but also its role as a reflector and marker of time.Thus, the trunk of a tree carries traces of bygone times.
Pine has a highly expressive bark and a very marked relief, and this is what led me to create a particularly large cast using a flexible material. This tree “skin” is the starting point for many of my
works: it constitutes their aesthetic and conceptual matrix, the centre of my research territory.
For most of my sculptures, the colour is part of the material itself. I tint the paper myself, developing a unique palette for each piece. Then, when conceiving and creating the prints, I use colour without giving it a figurative or meaningful value.
I have very often used the silhouettes of clementine skins as the contour of my pieces. What I like is the gesture of peeling the skin off one these spheres in one piece, and then spreading it out flat, horizontally. These shapes like on : a nautical map or a foothpath in a landscape.
But for other works I used other objects like dried fish skins, I made sculptures of souvenir photos. Thus new forms appeared in the reliefs: cartwheels, elements of a face. Opening them up and spreading them horizontally is like opening a book: a face can be read in a whole new way.
I use photos of people from my family not because of their personality, but for the archetypes that these people embody. Spread out and flattened, the organs that made up these faces and are recognisable in the print are cut out of their natural context. The face is made unrecognisable; but in their fragmented state, her features persist in representing a full face.
A paper head, once peeled, looks like a geographicalmap, an island with jagged contours. The interruptions in the contour of its silhouette are like memory gaps, the echo of a bygone time, where memory and oblivion stand side-by-side.