Nest
I often use the word cosmology to speak of my different families of works. As to say that a single work isn’t a fixed or isolated idea but always exist in relation to other works. I don’t feel limited to one specific medium, because it isn’t the choice of medium itself that I am concerned with but rather how ideas can assemble in space. I don’t strive to work in a “transdisciplinary” way, its rather the subjects that lay at the heart of my practice that move me in different directions.
Though my art and writing do not co-exist together in a literal sense, they are both very important to me. As a student I felt the need to make art because words seemed insufficient, I felt that through art I could reach depths impossible to attain with words. This was also the period I discovered the work of Glissant. Many of the words he employs to speak of the world like opacity, transparency, weave, or trembling had a very visceral effect on me and particularly on my work in sculpture. The idea of the weave was not just a metaphor to think of the world, but the word also resonated profoundly with my own condition, my own reality and existence. I do think that when we are borderless in our thinking, when guided not by the medium itself but by our experience of living, new language is possible. This language inevitably carries many layers.
The way we often reduce people to nationality, community, gender, and race often makes me feel uncomfortable. Certainly, because I feel like my own existence cannot be resumed to one simple definition. I have been shaped by many contradictory things. I see the self as a highly unstable entity, always subject to change and redefinition. We are in constant states of metamorphosis. We live in relation to each other but also in relation to time. While we try to understand where we come from by looking to the past, the present constantly reshape us. This instability of the self is something I constantly come back to in my writing and my work as an artist.
As I mentioned earlier, Glissant uses very formal words, always linked to perception, to speak of identity and the world. This was something I also took with me into sculpture. In my work the body is never complete but blurred, fragmented, shattered even elevated. We are constantly incomplete, always in the making. I try to make work that reflect this.
In my metal works everything becomes part of the artwork: the spectator looking at the work, the surrounding architecture and the everchanging light of the day constantly transform the work which exists only in relation to everything that surrounds it.
Inside a Father Form we see ourselves reflected infinitely, and when activated the border between our own body and work becomes a blur.
Through sparse language I try to obtain an openness, something vast. I think of how the one and same form, like our bodies, can inhabit a multitude of layers. To create works that resist simple categorization. Forms that have no final destination nor a closed definition but are constantly in transit. I think of how a multitude of reference move inside the same reduced form and how this gives birth to many different interpretations. It’s the perceptive effects that interest me. How sculpture can alter our relationship to the world and to our own bodies.
Art and life are not two separate entities, what you see in my art is the result of my own trajectory, my own multicultural condition. I operate in a grey zone, somewhere in between the western society I was born into and the culture I carry within myself, passed on to me by my parents. The question of loss has always been a driving force in my work. I think of words like rootlessness or memory loss. Though the word inevitably relates to notions of pain, it also speaks of the necessity to regenerate: To possibly find what’s been lost and if impossible, rebuild. This is why the subject of rebirth is so important to me. I think of this notion through the prism of migration. I think of my own condition and that of my parents. It is through the void produced by loss that I navigate and create work.
The idea is not to “search for an original source.” It’s quite the contrary: make evident the impossibility of one common original source. To create a body of work that is “transparent”, levitating above or below simple definitions. The sculpture Nest moves, as you mention, between many different interpretations. It hosts many different ideas and must carry on doing so.