Louise Nicollon des Abbayes

Summer Fire is a documentary and sculptural research project declined on sites victims of fires during the summer of 2022.

The project combines two approaches to contemporary landscape and its phenomena: the collection of the stories that animate it and the experience of a plastic practice from its collected materials.

Each territory, each plant, carries a mineral composition that is unique to it, the result of an accumulation of phenomena at different scales, from the geological era to human interventions and the physiological organization specific to each manifestation of life. .

At the origin of ceramics, there is the apprehension of the materials that make up the landscape in which the artist or craftsman lives and works, and the manufacture of alchemical techniques linked to the specificities of this landscape. For the past three years I have been reinterpreting these skills in intimacy with the landscapes in which I live and work, collecting the raw materials of a search for enamel in contemporary anthropized landscapes. Reduced to powder or ashes and brought to fusion, these materials will reveal something.

Ash glaze is a more specific technique of this research. These enamels were born from the observation of Chinese and then Japanese potters during their firing in wood-fired ovens. The unglazed pieces came out of the oven with a glaze on them!, the fruit of interaction between fire and his own ashes. This field of research has become representative in ceramics of the production of a know-ledge to recover waste. There are also Japanese mourning practices that use the ashes of a deceased to glaze a utilitarian object that will be reintroduced into the daily lives of loved ones.

At the same time, each fire carries a story that articulates in a singular way registers and expertises that are often separate, at least hierarchically, the intimate, the political, the environmental, the spiritual... The explorations of these damaged landscapes are also pretexts to the collection of various ways of understanding, explaining, crying and apprehending our relationship to the anthropic landscape in a different way. In parallel with the scientific research on this subject, the stories with multiple registers commit to other possibilities.

The project is therefore initiated around a double collection, ashes and stories, which will produce a raw material for the sculptural project. These collections will be carried out on several sites chosen for their mineral, political, cultural or narrative specificities.

Back in the studio, these raw materials, ashes and stories, are engaged in a work of plastic research with the intention of questioning the possibility of making sculpture "documentary", of renewing formats of dissemination to written inquiry and to work on the formal vocabulary of the memorial.

The materials collected are transformed. Each ash is the subject of a series of experimental tests, recipes and firings, from which will result a panoramic color chart, like a monumental screen, where each panel is the support for a shade of enamel associated with a site, to its subject and bears on its front the story of the investigation.

BIO

Louise Nicollon des Abbayes lives and works in Marseille,is graduated from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Nantes and the University of Aix Marseille in political science and landscape analysis.

From these two formations she crosses registers and tools for an understanding of the contemporary landscape.

Using sculpture, photography and writing, she imagines and experiences transdisciplinary and collaborative investigations that are as many ways of investing, analyzing and commenting on a territory as renewing formats of artistic representation.

For four years, ceramics and the arts of fire have been privileged tools for these scientific, technical, anthropological, political, intimate and plastic investigations. During long explorations in the peri-urban fringes, industrial sites, fires, she collects, sometimes steals, any raw material likely to nourish her research : wastes, minerals, plants, ashes, images, story…

In recent years she has worked simultaneously on 3 main axes: research on the representation of the industrial landscapes of Marseille from materials collected on 5 sites (Marseille 5 Views), an investigation of urban rioter fires associated with research on enamels of ashes (Colère, colère and CARAFONS!), a research on the memory of pottery know-ledge from North African migrations (Potier.e.s Marseille Nord).

She is a beneficiary of the mobility residency for visual artists of the Centro de residencias artísticas de Matadero Madrid in collaboration with Dos Mares, Marsella.