Protocosme

During her strolls in nature, Mélissande Herdier captures snippets of landscapes through photography, drawing and the collection of objects and minerals. These documentary excerpts mingle implicitly with stories of explorations, science-fictitious digressions and philosophy of sciences. The idea of a primitive cosmology of the elements thus takes shape through a state of reverie and animates a whole naturalist poetry.
With the idea of composing with the aesthetics of the depths of our Earth, black sandstone modules reproduce concretions like so many aggregates of volcanic bombs, projections of solidified liquid rock. The suspended structure, bleached over time by salt crystals, is reminiscent of underground karstic reliefs with a delicate and infinitely slow formation, at the antipodes of the great crash of volcanoes. Inspired by a basic chemistry experiment, the crystallization of ceramics takes place by evaporation of their container, water saturated with sea salt. The slow constitution of the salt crust requires patience and relaxation, far from anything spectacular; let time do the work.

Protocosme is an analogy to geological time and an evocation of the original atmosphere of the Earth. The installation forges a poetic link between the cosmic sky – which could look like a cloud of gas in the heart of a nebula – and a hypogeous environment or the depths of the ocean, whose environment would have favored the development of life on the young Earth.