Un buisson de clés (Sleutelbos)

Amber Roucourt is an artist based in Brussels, in her atelier at Cas-co Leuven, she explores everyday objects that she often recreate, enlarge, and twist using ceramic.

For her installation at Art Au Centre, she departs from a very common item: the key ring (le porte-clés). Yet, this seemingly banal object attracted Amber’s attention, in the ways in which it is personalized and made recognizable by their owner: the key ring becomes a token of singularity, a personal carrier of memories in constant motion.

Her installation at Art Au Centre brings together a new ensemble of works, collected as key rings of absurd and playful dimensions. Their oversized dimensions make them unhandy to carry—or perhaps they are key chains to the city.

Thanks to the artist’s recontextualisation, the pieces gain both physical and emotional presence when displayed in a vitrine. This is at the core of Amber’s practice: to find the tension between memories, collecting and remembering what constitutes our identities. How do everyday objects carry and translate emotions, feelings of belonging and personal narratives?