Since 2014, Droséra # La tentation du paysage has been an exhibition conceived as an open and inclusive platform. In it, I invite researchers, artists, farmers, stonemasons, gardeners, schoolchildren, bakers, writers and musicians to work together. The process stage, involving the people I meet along the way and highlighting very specific subjects, is fundamental before freeing the forms of the individual and collective imagination.
In 2021, the Creuse peat bog community was extended to the Latvian community with the Free Bog project, thanks to the COAL Prize. An ADAGP grant - winner of the Research 2023 endowment - will enable me to extend, I hope, my painting work to the peat bogs of the North of England.
" First and foremost, it was an intimate experience that I was physically confronted in the landscape of the Limousin peat bogs. Their timeless aesthetics, the dreamlike mists, the smells of humus and earth, the sounds of water scattered across the immensity of the wild expanses, the rippling of the tall grasses - all this absorbed me and made me enter into a dialogue with the surface of the landscape. Then I learnt that millions of years had been recorded in the shallow depths of the peat bogs. Peat, the product of the slow and partial decomposition of sphagnum moss, sinks a millimeter every century, carrying with it a powerful historical density, from the Age of Christ (at a depth of one meter) to the Iron Age (two meters). Peat is a living memory that bears witness to man's past and future commitments: palynologists can analyze the pollen it contains and read in it the philosophical, political and spiritual links between man and the landscape. It is this history of man and nature that I wanted to interpret and inscribe in a new aesthetic. From the ancient Greek " covered in dew ", Drosera is the carnivorous plant of the peat bogs that traps its prey with its mucilage, which resembles dewdrops.
The actions of human beings seem to be reflected in it, in the image of the metaphorical formula of the Chinese philosopher Han Fei Zi: "The whole sky is reflected in a single drop of dew". Games of mirrors blur the lines and blur the boundaries between materials and images, sky and earth (Droséra la tentation du paysage painting). The past is no longer behind us, but beneath our feet. It rises discreetly to the surface, twirling in the sky (Les Inaperçus). The semi-aquatic landscape could take the form of the mysterious ocean of memories that envelops the planet Solaris in Tarkovsky's film. Creative emanations are produced in the course of conversations." Julie Navarro, 2016
Part of the body of work presented below comes from collective workshops held in 2016 at Château de Vassivière - artist residency of the Centre International d'Art et du Paysage (CIAP), with the collaboration of teachers Frédéric Lagarde, Sophie Noguet, and their pupils from Collège Jean Picart Le Doux, and stone mason Pierre Nourrisseau, as well as farmers Rémi Volondat, Michel Foucault, and the late Marinette Meaume.
" In dreaming of depth, we dream of our depth, in dreaming of the secret virtue of substances, we dream of our secret being ", Bachelard.
THE ICE RIVER
Industrial bricks of Irish peat are assembled on the ground to form a strange trail of footprints that the wheels of a tractor might leave in its path. Does the path lead back to our origins? Does the trail represent the icy river that carries the evidence of human history ?
PEAT BRICK THROWING
International peat brick-throwing competition with pupils from the Collège Jean Picart Le Doux in Bourganeuf at the Lachaud peat bog (Creuse), in collaboration with teachers Frédéric Lagarde and Sophie Noguet. The schoolchildren take it in turns, in a choreographic posture, to throw a loaf of peat into the celestial heights. The earth has left its original darkness. The photographic image fixes it in its cosmic trajectory. Slideshow click ici
THE RECUMBENTS (TORNÀ)
The tornà - lit. "ghost" in Occitan - were created with the help of teachers Frédéric Lagarde and Sophie Noguet, and pupils from the Collège Jean Picart Le Doux.
The shovel was used to penetrate the earth in the image of an ancient fertility rite, allowing the subconscious to be "excavated". The peat sculptures, which range in color from grey-black (close to the mother earth) to reddish-brown (towards the surface of the soil), have stood the test of time. Their degree of burial reveals a varied palette of colors. Images printed on tracing paper are superimposed. Together they generate a ghostly flow.
THE UNNOTICED
Les Inaperçus gives us a glimpse of impalpable emotions in the landscape, like an emanation from the depths of the ground. The series was born of the microscopic observation of pollen in peat. Matter and images merge.
COSMOTROUBLE
Writing workshop at Château de Vassivière - artist residency of the Centre International d'Art et du Paysage, with teachers Frédéric Lagarde, Sophie Noguet and pupils from Collège Jean Picart Le Doux. Intuitive wordplay, analogies and disguises straddled the paths of the collective imagination. The result was the word Cosmotourbe, engraved by Pierre Nourrisseau in Creusois granite.
In 2021, the Creuse peat bog community was extended to the Latvian community with the Free Bog project, thanks to the COAL Prize. An ADAGP grant - winner of the Research 2023 endowment - will enable me to extend, I hope, my painting work to the peat bogs of the North of England.
" First and foremost, it was an intimate experience that I was physically confronted in the landscape of the Limousin peat bogs. Their timeless aesthetics, the dreamlike mists, the smells of humus and earth, the sounds of water scattered across the immensity of the wild expanses, the rippling of the tall grasses - all this absorbed me and made me enter into a dialogue with the surface of the landscape. Then I learnt that millions of years had been recorded in the shallow depths of the peat bogs. Peat, the product of the slow and partial decomposition of sphagnum moss, sinks a millimeter every century, carrying with it a powerful historical density, from the Age of Christ (at a depth of one meter) to the Iron Age (two meters). Peat is a living memory that bears witness to man's past and future commitments: palynologists can analyze the pollen it contains and read in it the philosophical, political and spiritual links between man and the landscape. It is this history of man and nature that I wanted to interpret and inscribe in a new aesthetic. From the ancient Greek " covered in dew ", Drosera is the carnivorous plant of the peat bogs that traps its prey with its mucilage, which resembles dewdrops.
The actions of human beings seem to be reflected in it, in the image of the metaphorical formula of the Chinese philosopher Han Fei Zi: "The whole sky is reflected in a single drop of dew". Games of mirrors blur the lines and blur the boundaries between materials and images, sky and earth (Droséra la tentation du paysage painting). The past is no longer behind us, but beneath our feet. It rises discreetly to the surface, twirling in the sky (Les Inaperçus). The semi-aquatic landscape could take the form of the mysterious ocean of memories that envelops the planet Solaris in Tarkovsky's film. Creative emanations are produced in the course of conversations." Julie Navarro, 2016
Part of the body of work presented below comes from collective workshops held in 2016 at Château de Vassivière - artist residency of the Centre International d'Art et du Paysage (CIAP), with the collaboration of teachers Frédéric Lagarde, Sophie Noguet, and their pupils from Collège Jean Picart Le Doux, and stone mason Pierre Nourrisseau, as well as farmers Rémi Volondat, Michel Foucault, and the late Marinette Meaume.
" In dreaming of depth, we dream of our depth, in dreaming of the secret virtue of substances, we dream of our secret being ", Bachelard.
THE ICE RIVER
Industrial bricks of Irish peat are assembled on the ground to form a strange trail of footprints that the wheels of a tractor might leave in its path. Does the path lead back to our origins? Does the trail represent the icy river that carries the evidence of human history ?
PEAT BRICK THROWING
International peat brick-throwing competition with pupils from the Collège Jean Picart Le Doux in Bourganeuf at the Lachaud peat bog (Creuse), in collaboration with teachers Frédéric Lagarde and Sophie Noguet. The schoolchildren take it in turns, in a choreographic posture, to throw a loaf of peat into the celestial heights. The earth has left its original darkness. The photographic image fixes it in its cosmic trajectory. Slideshow click ici
THE RECUMBENTS (TORNÀ)
The tornà - lit. "ghost" in Occitan - were created with the help of teachers Frédéric Lagarde and Sophie Noguet, and pupils from the Collège Jean Picart Le Doux.
The shovel was used to penetrate the earth in the image of an ancient fertility rite, allowing the subconscious to be "excavated". The peat sculptures, which range in color from grey-black (close to the mother earth) to reddish-brown (towards the surface of the soil), have stood the test of time. Their degree of burial reveals a varied palette of colors. Images printed on tracing paper are superimposed. Together they generate a ghostly flow.
THE UNNOTICED
Les Inaperçus gives us a glimpse of impalpable emotions in the landscape, like an emanation from the depths of the ground. The series was born of the microscopic observation of pollen in peat. Matter and images merge.
COSMOTROUBLE
Writing workshop at Château de Vassivière - artist residency of the Centre International d'Art et du Paysage, with teachers Frédéric Lagarde, Sophie Noguet and pupils from Collège Jean Picart Le Doux. Intuitive wordplay, analogies and disguises straddled the paths of the collective imagination. The result was the word Cosmotourbe, engraved by Pierre Nourrisseau in Creusois granite.