Île du Dôme
(2022)
Île du Dôme takes as its starting point the science-fiction graphic novel L’Île d’Auvergne (1993), which imagines a future in which rising water levels have transformed the Auvergne region into an archipelago. In this flooded landscape, the city of Liberty is built across the trunks and canopies of giant sequoias whose roots have adapted to permanent submersion. Despite the scale of the catastrophe, the human relationship to nature remains largely unchanged: survival is still organised through occupation, extraction and control.
Developed as a site-specific work for the Musée d’Art Roger-Quilliot, Île du Dôme proposes a different evolutionary response. Here, humans themselves become rooted: skin turns to bark or stone, bodies become static, and individuals merge with the landscape as living islands capable of supporting other forms of life. The work uses this speculative transformation to rethink ideas of adaptation, interdependence and communication, imagining a society no longer positioned above its environment, but physically embedded within it.
Produced during the Arnis Art Residency in Arnis, Germany, Island Shoals responds to the particular geography of Germany’s smallest city, situated on a narrow peninsula extending into the Schlei inlet. Formerly an island, Arnis was connected to the mainland in the 18th century, leaving a landscape where the distinction between island and mainland remains geographically and historically present.
Drawing on nautical charts and navigation markers, the work takes the form of an abstracted shoal buoy — a device normally used to signal shallow waters, submerged obstacles and navigational hazards. Positioned on the isthmus that now connects Arnis to the mainland, the marker offers neither a clear warning nor a route towards safe water. Instead, Island Shoals uses this ambiguous geography to consider the island as both refuge and enclosure: a place defined as much by the possibility of retreat as by separation from what lies beyond it.
Location
Museé d'art Roger Quillot, Clermont-Ferrand
Dates
2022
Materials
Quilting tecnique on outdoor fabric
