Caroline Le Méhauté
Research and creation residency
from February 15 to April 12, 2021.Artistic Practice
Caroline Le Méhauté’s practice lies at the crossroads of different mediums including drawing, video, sculpture, and installation. She has developed a series of installations and sculptures using soil, most notably a variety of peat that has never been used by humans to cultivate crops. For the artist, soil is a living, evolving substance that carries its own dynamics. Her work invites us to envision a shift in our relationship with the environment. The title "Negotiation" is given to each of her sculptures as a metaphor of an interaction with the world that must be consistently examined and renewed. Each of her pieces could be regarded as an element within the poetics of the earth that allows us to amplify our sensibility to raw materials as a source of the living.
NÉGOCIATION 34, wood, metal, coconut peat 100 x 280 x 250 cm 2011
Geopoetics
For her residency, Caroline Le Méhauté settled into the workshop located in the heart of the Saint-Germain des Près neighborhood and opened a breach by creating three new Négociations, the one hundred and eighth, one hundred and ninth, and the one hundred and tenth. In doing so, she has accomplished the feat of introducing immensity into intimacy, the trembling of the world and vertigo into the heart of the lifeless city. Négociation 108, entitled Catherine, links the intimate and secret to a moment’s contemplation of the in nitely large and long; Négociation 109, entitled Croître en silence (Growing in silence) encourages us to understand the throbbing force contained in everything mineral, Négociation 110, entited Sui Generis, reminds us of the connection between earth and the universe, between what is terrestrial and stellar. The clay tablets, entitled Chaque limite en dissimule une autre (Each limit conceals another) are cracked from the trembling and pulsing of the earth. The materials were all collected from surrounding locations: peat from Baupte, sand from Fontainebleau, farming soil from the Meudon Forest, and soil from Parisian parks and gardens.
The physical and material link to the earth in Caroline Le Méhauté’s work is the demonstration of a sensitive relationship with the living; the Geopoetics that the artist unfurls are Gaiapoetics.
Geopoetics - Residency restitution
Photographic credits - Martin Argyroglo
