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
There is a Gorilla on Mars takes as its starting point a widely circulated image from NASA’s Spirit rover in which a small rock formation was read as the figure of a gorilla. The image became convincing precisely through its poor quality: magnification, compression and distance stripped the object of definition, allowing perception to fill in what the image could no longer clearly describe.
The work extends this logic through found digital images, isolating and enlarging fragments until their original subjects become unstable or abstract. These fragments are then translated back into drawings and sculptures, moving from object to image and back to object again. Rather than reconstructing a lost original, the process produces a new one: a physical form generated through error, projection and misrecognition. The work approaches looking as an almost forensic act — searching images for clues, building narratives from incomplete evidence, and testing the point at which perception slips between recognition and invention.