I like the idea of art as a place where we go on disorientating spatial, mental and temporal journeys. And I think art is a privileged way to access this territory, where frontiers are blurred between material and spiritual, where we can connect differently to things by guiding through space and time differently. I like the idea that all the elements making up worlds, whether they are material or spiritual, are linked to each other by echoes and reminiscences, and that these connections chart the circulations of a common wandering, without origin nor purpose, in an open ecosystem.

James Lingwood, Artangel’s Co-Director, invited me to think about making a project on Orford Ness in 2019, then the pandemic arrived, the possibility of travel stopped and consequently, I didn’t have the opportunity to go to Orford Ness before the installation of my works in June 2021. I have never worked under such conditions before. When I first looked at photos or videos of Lab 1, I was struck by the familiarity of the place, its connection to some of my drawings. And because the audience couldn’t get inside the Lab for safety reasons, the idea was for the installation to be viewed like a drawing. The history of the site plays, of course, an important role: the military presence with its activities and its secrets, mingling with a nature that never stopped struggling to recover. The Residents is an installation taking up again this technical, natural and cultural history, with human, mineral and vegetal worlds, their many temporalities intertwining one with the other. The inhabitants of Lab 1, The Residents, are in the midst of plants, water, sculptures, suitcases and a totem that seems to be floating on water, but they are also taking place in history. Perhaps they are remnants of a society that has resided in Orford Ness.

All the things that I create are related one to another, my work is a network... Sculptures and drawings are intertwined. That means that they can exchange their properties and qualities and move from two to three dimensions. Sculptures can draw the spaces, in which they are placed, and drawings can sculpt the spaces in which they are exhibited. The elements, the materials, the shapes can be interchanged. Together they bring about a kind of ecosystem where my drawings, sculptures or installations can echo each other.

Artists have the opportunity to invent their own way of working, but the peculiarity of their work is that it doesn’t really have a time, and it doesn’t respect any schedule. Sometimes I wonder if, when I dream, I don’t work more efficiently than when I walk around my studio to solve a new problem.

Every piece I do leads to another, I change with them, as I am changing through the events of the world that affect me. I don’t have the feeling that I changed my way of working, but maybe it is my way of working that changed me.

In some of my spatial arrangements, one can find constraints that address the psychic. The body is constantly measured against the framework of a space: they remind us of what our body is supposed to do, and that such and such an object is there for our comfort, for our work, etc. When we reverse the scales and modify the orders in which they are supposed to exist, these objects and their spaces change: they become multiple, between presence and representation, between real world and imaginary world, with all the doubts and worries that carries this instability.

No, initially, I would have preferred to do nothing or nothing much. Ideally, I would have liked to live in a barrel with dogs, like Diogenes: but I have neither his wisdom nor his courage. I still share something of this through my life with dogs...

There is a reciprocal relationship between things and materials they are built with. I can start to think while looking at a rock but I can also have an idea that needs to find its rock… I try to work, as far as I can, with materials whose properties I know, in order to have the freedom to repent, start over, or change during the process of doing. When I go to a foundry, I spend long periods there, to the chagrin of the team casting the forms, to continue this dialogue with things and materials.

Artworks involve relationships between different elements that exist together, more than themes. Works that have affected me deeply are as mysterious as Orford Ness. Some works grasp us and we don’t really understand why.

It’s not a lesson, it’s a taste: the taste of freedom.

I am working on several solo shows: one is based on drawings, the exhibition will be at the Centre Pompidou in June 2022, another one is an installation at La Bourse de Paris in October 2023, and yet another is a solo show at the KINDL in Berlin in 2023.