PAIN / ROSES

My work rests on the study and the interpretation of heritage artworks. I take over images or objects that are full of history and I express myself through their own methods of construction and production of sense. Using different reproduction processes, I revisit, distort and subvert them to make them talk differently in new contexts.

For this installation created in collaboration with stage designer Orto Botanico Studio and designed especially for Art au Centre #5, I drew my inspiration from the ancient tradition of bride vases. These white porcelain vases were produced abundantly in France and Belgium between the middle of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century. They were part of the wedding ritual and were preserved, decorated with the flowers of the bride’s crown or bouquet, under a glass cover placed on a painted wood base. Their ornamentation appeals to the category of eternal love, fertility and prosperity whereas their shape of shell or largely open fan is a symbol of receptiveness to celestial influences. The organic nature of these vases that I reinterpreted freely demonstrates the naturalist thought of the 19^th century.

This ideology also fed an edifying misogynistic literature that formerly contributed to the maintenance of female artists out of the public sphere and is illustrated in this text : « Women are still rarely inclined to intellectual activities […]. Given that they usually have a pleasant sense for the shape, quick perceptions, creativity and vivid imagination, it is no surprise that clay modelling tempts their pretty fingers. Likewise, the nature of women encourages them to sculpt imaginative and sentimental motifs rather than […] artworks resulting from a pure creative imagination » (John Jackson Jarves, 1871).

In response to this and for the song*, I thus adopted this approach : « Bread and roses ! Bread and roses ! » And I let my hands remember the best and the worst to sculpt clay and foam breads.

* The popular song Bread and Roses was composed during the textile strikes of 1912 in the US, this feminist slogan was used during the World March of Women to protest against discrimination and violence towards women.