Pauline D’Andigné

I loved this experience! The residency is in a sculpture park surrounded by nature. Working in an environment like that was new to me, and I felt deeply involved in the production. I live in Paris, and the contrast I experienced between an urban and a natural environment, not being in my usual production space, gave me a certain freedom in creating and innovating the pieces. It made me experiment and see some aspects of my work differently. It was also fascinating to see what can happen outside. Even though you tend to think of nature as a very quiet and calm place, there's so much activity! In the trees, around the flowers, the grass, and the constantly changing light, you feel a tingling in this seeming calm; it was very striking.

This exhibition consists of works that are both pictorial and sculptural. The exhibition space offers an immersive installation of inflated flowers suspended from metal chains and appearing to melt into a frozen fluid. On the wall, a series of paintings engage in a dialogue with this sculptural proposition. Both types of works offer an immersion into ambiguous pieces that are simultaneously industrial and organic, playful and unsettling, fragile and menacing.

In my fabric paintings, I explore several gestures using subtraction and addition. The first step of my work consists of bleaching the fabric in zones and randomly creating a fast, fluid drawing. Then, I draw a second pattern with pastel that responds to the first and gives certain areas a particular relief, texture or rough consistency to the canvas. In the third step, I compose a final drawing on the computer. This one consciously reveals areas that emphasise the previous drawing, giving it this particular effect. It's a dialogue between the different layers of composition, each influencing and transforming the previous one. They somehow support each other.

When the text talks about childhood, it refers more generally to the experience that everyone may have had during that particular period, not a specific personal experience. In the paintings, scribbles evoke a certain freedom of gesture that can be found in children's drawings. However, there is also this distinction that we are taught in childhood between well done and poorly done; these two notions are inherent in education, school, learning, and authority. When you look at children's colouring, the lines go beyond the predefined shapes, and their colours often do not match reality. Although the composition is very intentional in my work, I like the idea that colours and lines unfold in the works without being contained within the distinct boundaries of a particular form.

I like this material; its plasticity immediately refers to a form of industrialism. Formally, the material's shine and the light emphasise its folds, reforming the mass it contains. Through its shine and smooth surface, there's also something that refers to the body. One cannot help but also think of a sexualised dimension in this material.

It's a dialogue; visually, some forms in the paintings directly reference the installation. In Pink Doodles Cut, one can easily link the pink form to the drawing of the chains in space. The simple, cut-out form of the flowers in Big Flowers on Yellow Grid is very close to shadowing my installed sculptural works.

The change in scale allows for a new dimension of familiar elements. The enlargement makes this element both threatening and somewhat grotesque; it inflates itself, resembling a buoy or inflatable balloon light. Its suspension also plays into this idea, but the fluid dripping and the chains holding them suggest something else.

I am participating in a group exhibition in Beijing with HdM Gallery this summer. I am also developing a series of paintings I will show during a solo show in Paris with Ketabi Bourdet Gallery in the spring.