Fleurir les rochers

Carried out during confinement, this project was a return to the basics, to the essentials, a benevolent exploration, a contemplative research where walking in nature and responsible picking are at the heart of an aesthetic production. Fleurir les rochers offers a metaphor for this resilience, imbued with poetry and hope.

Like the herbarium, I collected, classified and listed these specimens. Like an escape, like a new way of apprehending this world, this new territory. I have listed images of the flora that surrounds me, to marvel at so much beauty. Each of the floral layouts has been documented before the process, thus being able to associate the results with the source plants and to create a truly supernatural, enchanting — even idyllic — botanical treatise.

Inspired by photograms and alternative chemical processes of film photography, which is usually my medium, the botanical prints are obtained after boiling the flowers and leaves, in water including alum, vinegar and put under press. The pigments of the plants are thus transferred onto the various white and colored papers. The images obtained are a universe of color, spots and details produced by natural and eco-responsible elements, depending on the amount of tannin in the plant.

The images obtained, these impressions, these imprints of a past that offer us a rereading of the flora. They make the imperceptible visible. Between the sediment of the leaf, of the flower which leaves its mark there, the proof of its existence. They create a nebulous, almost magical visual and graphic ensemble.