Artist
Coline Jourdan
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.
Soulever la poussière
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.
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.
Anaïs Boileau, whose activity is divided between work for the international press and personal work, was assiduously engaged during the confinement in plastic experiments. The resulting photographs are a kind of palimpsest of her photography, striking a subtle balance between the documentary aspect of her practice and her undiminished appetite for shapes, colours, materials and their interactions. Deploying her studio outdoors, she places everyday objects and materials within the frame of her photography, which she then brings to life, sometimes seeking harmony, sometimes dissonance. Sometimes, she supports the pictoriality by introducing paint, blurring a little more this play of surfaces. What is then printed on the skin of the image is as much the result of her gesture of composition as the effect of the indelible imprint of the Mediterranean sun, the primary subject of all her photography.
Nolwenn Brod's practice does not play with formal experimentation in its current sense, no overflow towards sculpture, painting or any other way out. It is a mining photography, which digs into its subject, in the duration, in the thickness of the blacks of the photographic image. As the projects follow one another, we observe the photographer in search of her relationship with the other, a journey for which photography is both the witness and the vehicle. The elsewhere of the residency, the exogenous anchoring point that it embodies, constitutes her privileged mode of operation. Recently in Beirut, Lebanon, in Lodz, Poland, or more recently in Brest, France, she slowly enters into a relationship, according to the encounters, which soon take shape in photographs, in the depths of the being and its contrary movements, between vulnerability and strength, fragility and affirmation. To the portraits, she adds fragments of bodies, details, nocturnal landscapes in the half-light, fragmented interiors, like so many points of this delicate cartography of the elsewhere that constitutes the other. The work is done in the length of the relationship and soon also in that of the filmic space which she decides to invest fully for her latest project Les hautes solitudes.
Pauline Hisbacq's images take their place in the great white of the page; frail presences, in appearance.
Whether she is the author of the photographs, as in many of her projects, or whether she makes use of archival images gleaned from the Internet, she applies the same gesture: she samples, deliberately focusing on the fragment. By its very nature, the photographic image is framed in a way that does not hide the hand's gesture or its imperfections. The fragment is then placed on a single sheet of paper, often in correspondence with another composition, in the pages of a book (the editorial form is dear to the artist) or on the exhibition wall. Recently, Pauline Hisbacq shared her Songs for Women and Birds, a series of collages tracing her reading of the first large-scale feminist and environmentalist movement that took place in Great Britain in the early 1980s. From the archive images, she retains those in which gestures of solidarity are prominent and deliberately avoids explicit illustrations of repression and violence, only a few framed primers surreptitiously recalling them. The interplay of hands, the interlacing of arms, the embraces call for our full attention. In this space of the sheet, Pauline Hisbacq then takes us, as she was able to search for the image among the flow of the Internet, to make our own way towards the image, towards the history of the relationships of sorority and mixed power that unfold there, and to listen to the voices, songs and cries of which this large white space is an echo. The murmur of the image, with its discreet hold on the page, and the modesty of the tool, photocopy and scissors, make a great noise in her work and are enough in themselves to open up a new mode of narration.
Coline Jourdan recently undertook a residency in the South of France, in a project that is both documentary and visual - Raising the Dust - which explores an old arsenic mine and the visible and invisible impacts of the pollution caused by its exploitation. The photographer had already expressed her desire to image the natural landscape altered by human action. Her first works immediately took the path of experimentation, attempting to make a direct imprint of the polluted landscape on the surface of the film by immersion. Her documentary requirements quickly led her to make her approach more complex and to take care to avoid any systematism in these experiments. The photographic treatment of the image will then give prevalence to the narrative capacity and the experimentation will be carried out in a strict rigour of appropriateness, welcome in a photographic artistic landscape over-saturated with plastic experiments carried out on the account of ecological disasters. Rather than the immersion of the medium, of the film, it is our own that she engages with Raising the Dust. She now handles several types of images: sober frontal shots are applied to the rocks that have been removed, large colour landscapes unfold a seemingly sublime nature, other black and white shots reintroduce the scientific gesture... So many layers that translate the cohabitation of ambivalent realities and feelings in the perimeter of the mine and its surroundings.