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Coline Jourdan
The work of Coline Jourdan questions the perception and representation of toxic and its relationship with matter, space and image. Her projects engage a reflection on its presence in our daily environment and on its imperceptible impacts. If toxicity is generally not seen, if the danger it represents is often the object of denial, art can be a tool to make it visible and raise awareness.
Committed to the defense of the environment, the photographer nevertheless takes care to approach the question without falling into certain commonplaces of ecology. She keeps an ambiguous relationship with her subject, placed between concern about the environmental mutations due to the Anthropocene and fascination for the esthetic transformations that chemistry can create. Before she became aware of the ecological troubles we are facing, she was fascinated by the mechanisms of revelation of photography resulting from chemical reactions. Chemistry then appeared to her as a pharmakhon: a destructive poison containing within itself the tools of remediation, of a positive transformation of matter.
Her photographic project includes a part of formal experimentation. She creates various manipulations that disturb the surface of the photograph in order to create spaces of visual experiences. What is represented there is altered, mimicry and photographic realism are both concretely damaged and theoretically questioned.
Her choice to confront toxic material, rather than avoiding it or criticizing it from the outside, also materializes through fieldwork. Going to contaminated sites, she then reworks the images to modify the perception that we can have of them. This confusion thrown into the representations questions the "vision" of human on their environment, in the double sense of the term, to occupy the interstice which separates the physical space from the mental representation.
Reactivating the codes of romantic imagery like those of documentary realism, Coline Jourdan finally subverts their own effects in a poetic body-to-body, which questions a biased, manipulated and altered vision of the world and nature.
Coline Jourdan, born in 1993, lives and works in Rouen, Normandy. She graduated from the National School of Art in Dijon in 2017. Her work has been shown in group and personal exhibitions (Nicéphore Niepce Museum as part of the Ateliers Vortex Photographic Print Prize in 2019 ; La Gacilly Festival, Baden, Austria, 2021; Artefacts, (Residence 1+2), Chapelle des Cordeliers, Toulouse, 2020; Les noirceurs du fleuve rouge, Full B1 Gallery, Rouen, 2019). In 2021, she received she received the Support for contemporary documentary photography from the CNAP, as well as individual aid for creation from the Normandy Region. The same year, she won the 50CC Air de Normandie artist grant.
Les noirceurs du fleuve rouge
The work of Coline Jourdan questions the perception and representation of toxic and its relationship with matter, space and image. Her projects engage a reflection on its presence in our daily environment and on its imperceptible impacts. If toxicity is generally not seen, if the danger it represents is often the object of denial, art can be a tool to make it visible and raise awareness.
Committed to the defense of the environment, the photographer nevertheless take care to approach the question without falling into certain commonplaces of ecology. She keeps an ambiguous relationship with her subject, placed between concern about the environmental mutations due to the Anthropocene and fascination for the esthetic transformations that chemistry can create. Before she became aware of the ecological troubles we are facing, she was fascinated by the mechanisms of revelation of photography resulting from chemical reactions. Chemistry then appeared to her as a pharmakhon: a destructive poison containing within itself the tools of remediation, of a positive transformation of matter.
Her photographic project includes a part of formal experimentation. She creates various manipulations that disturb the surface of the photograph in order to create spaces of visual experiences. What is represented there is altered, mimicry and photographic realism are both concretely damaged and theoretically questioned.
Her choice to confront toxic material, rather than avoiding it or criticizing it from the outside, also materializes through fieldwork. Going to contaminated sites, she then reworks the images to modify the perception that we can have of them. This confusion thrown into the representations questions the "vision" of human on their environment, in the double sense of the term, to occupy the interstice which separates the physical space from the mental representation.
Reactivating the codes of romantic imagery like those of documentary realism, Coline Jourdan finally subverts their own effects in a poetic body-to-body, which questions a biased, manipulated and altered vision of the world and nature.