
Imperial Black
September 5 to 27 > 2024
Fourvière Museum Lyon 9
exhibition organized by Mirabilia Lyon
Black Apron #8
For me, a work of art is the fusion of an interior landscape (our fears, our anxieties, our obsessions, our desires) and a physical reality, an exterior landscape with its colors, its smells, its rhythms and its lines.
It was built for me, a miner's daughter, through the stories of the depths and the surface (the Carreau) as it also appears in Germinal, the work of Zola inspired by the Brulé strike at Ricamarie where I was born, as in the landscape of Félix Thiollier, photographer.
from Saint-Etienne, a former weaver. In the second half of the 19th century, both described or showed men living from and in the Black of Coal with its fragments, its variations in material and texture, going from mineral to gaseous.
(gas in the air that we breathe and which kills miners but also gas that repairs and on which I paint).
These miners have built themselves through their struggles, their daily fights to survive with their families in a city designed on the Surface
around the slag heaps and headframes.
It is this landscape that inspires me. The faults in the rock dug up to 1000m deep are like the lines of the fabric that I crumple and the ground bristling with metal beams or leaning houses (because the ground is collapsing) have guided my needle and its thread as well as the thimble like the hammer and the miner's helmet.