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.
Location
Museé d'art Roger Quillot, Clermont-Ferrand
Dates
2022
Materials
Quilting tecnique on outdoor fabric
TAKE TEN takes the pink walls of Las Palmas Project Space as both material and proposition. Closely resembling Baker-Miller Pink — a colour controversially associated with calming aggressive behaviour — the existing architecture becomes the starting point for an investigation into colour as a purported tool for regulating mood, behaviour and wellbeing.
The exhibition traces this promise through a series of materials associated with soothing, healing or relief, including calamine, Himalayan salt, bismuth subsalicylate and cochineal pigment. Their apparent benignity is repeatedly complicated: cochineal requires the mass harvesting of insects; excessive exposure or consumption produces adverse effects; and the therapeutic claims surrounding Baker-Miller Pink remain disputed. Through sculpture, painting, textile and a continuously running fountain, TAKE TEN constructs an environment in which reassurance gradually becomes suspect, using humour and contradiction to question the impulse to package discomfort into something manageable, attractive and calm.
