Artist residency in the Spitzbergen islands:

Inlandsis Association sails

Inlandsis

Inlandsis is an association who was born of the meeting of four visual artists working on various but complimentary medias, four artists able to put the usual practice of their art at risk in an exceptional place and a mutating territory.

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(photo: Caroline Morel-Fontaine)

The expedition of Juin 2017

On june 15th, 2017 we will aboard on the Knut, a 15-meters-long yacht initially made to resist weather conditions to the transat Québec/Saint-Malo and transmuted by the association Marémotrice in research and creation laboratory for artistic residences in Arctic region. We'll spend one month on board.

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(Photographie de Benjamin Ruffieux)

De 74° à 81° Nord

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The cap of the expédition is the Island of Spitzbergen in the norvegian archipelago of the Svalbard, located in polar territory between the Groenland sea, the Barents sea and the Arctic ocean. 60% of the archipelago is covered by ice. Its closeness with the Pole, its human and animal population, its history, are some reasons which motivated the Inlandsis association to work on the spot. The Svalbard is part of the polar region which are at risk of important climatic and human transformations during the next decades.

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(Photo: Benjamin Ruffieux)

We'll fly to Oslo from Paris. From there, we'll reach Longyearbyen, "capitale" of the Spitzberg, only town to have an airport. It's from this site that we'll aboard on the yacht and commence the expedition. During a month and acording to the allowed possibilities by the navigation's climatic conditions, we'll drive up the west coast to the East of the island. Plying first the Isfjord, we'll stop at the ancient coal town of Barentsburg then in the Trygghamna fjord. Subsequently we'll be able to continue the trip by the west, whose coast is drawn by the net of glaciers, until the north where raise themselves the peaks of the archipelago. Confronting us thereby to many front of glaciers as that Smeerenburgfjord and Liefdefjord. Passing through the bay of La Madelaine, go along the North coast to the East coast to achieve the natural reserve in the North-East, approching the polar bears and colonies of walruses.

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(Photographie de Benjamin Ruffieux)

Work of research on the Knut

During this trip, we will gather drawings, photos, texts and impressions that we'll work on and develop in our workshops afterwards. we also wish to produce together a video documentary.

As a first step towards the Spitzberg residence project in 2017, we four plastic artists founded in October 2016 the association Inlandsis which seals our common will to organize future events such as various exhibitions and publications, projections of our film but also conferences, workshop in schools to sensitize in the fragility and thus in the vital conservation of this wild space: the Arctic.

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(Photo: Benjamin Ruffieux)

The artists of Inlandsis and their project

Clarisse Griffon Du Bellay,

sculptor

http://www.clarissegriffondubellay.com

(photo: Nicolas Aykaç)

I build my work around the living, the body, the flesh, its connection to time and its sensitivity to elements. I chose to work on a living material like wood, and I found my work on its impressive nature. The notion of landscape has always been part of the imaginery of my sculptures. First as a dreamt dimension inscribed in body substances. Then during my art residency in Spain at the Casa de Velazquez, I treated the human body like a landscape, like a raw material marked by time and elements.I wish now to work on the landscape as an entity and invest it totally.

(Être-paysage - bois : séquoia, chêne et orme - 1,40 x 2,50 x 2,5 m - 2014)

My project, once back from Spitzberg is to joint and overlap big wooden pannels, cut logs or whole pieces, representing various scales of landscapes, sometimes the size of a print or wider visions. These pannels will then form walls, a reminder of glacier faces ; or a planking on the floor with various heights to illustrate reliefs, rocks and ice.

Each piece of cut wood will show the transformation of material because of the elements. A kind of inventory of geological diversity, a gallery of different ice shapes and the impact of thaw on the rocks.

The dates chosen for the expedition will allow to observe naked rocks, thawing, and glaciers. My sculpture will show the different steps of the thawing metamorphosis on ice. I want to draw and mark on the material the cracking, rising, fragmenting and caving phenomenons of glacial erosion. A work about transformation, the shape, from its creation, its evolution until its collapsing.

Yann Lacroix,

painter

http://www.yannlacroix.com

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(photo: Caroline Morel-Fontaine)

« Aren’t we closed to other places ?

Yann Lacroix questions the smooth wavering of unusual situations where the artefact and the detail take over the spectacular nature of the picture.

His works tell the strange feeling of being on the edge of understanding a specific moment, this delicate time when consciousness gathers its strength to decode the message of a situation. Why getting lost in the translation of our feelings, our memories, our environment? It is not located, it is not geographical nor mapped.

Shaken by the collection of memories, Yann Lacroix gathers elements to build a translation of his feelings. The elsewhere exists as a mental concept, a mental landscape. It mostly exists on the edge of life. He spreads clues that bring us off camera, this moment when the vision gets lost in the decoding of a picture, that is to say its translation.

The paintings of Yann Lacroix don’t pretend reducing the moment to a specific size. On the contrary, these are snapshots. The paintings are between the two, on the fringe of the action itself. Yann Lacroix focuses on a detail, then in the way of Proust, opens to the memory of the environment. His paintings mark the gap between the observing time, the moment, and the more synthetic and willingly incomplete time of the work in studio. Trying to translate the « real » in painting involves to get lost. To get lost on purpose. The detail is precise, the rest is voluntarily blurred, far and heterogeneous. The choice takes over the frame. The landscapes are recomposed, restored. Parks, gardens, zoos that form together a similar universe. »

Théo-Mario Coppola

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(Nice place for good value and the swimming pool was clean - huile sur toile - 230 x 200 cm - 2016)

Up there, I will collect notes, drawings and photographs that will be reminders afterwards. Once back to the workshop, my project consists in realizing a serie of three large-size paintings, 300x 200 cm, and a serie of ten small-size paintings, 18x 24 cm. 

I will approach the idea of a panorama, by leading the viewer to the atmosphere of the archipelago, though the colours and lights that I will have experienced over there. The small- size paintings will be like snapshots allowing to remember more intimately the experience.

Cedric Le Corf,

sculptor/engraver

http://cedriclecorf.brushd.com

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(photographie d'Agnès Prévost)

Over time, the anatomical landscape, inspired by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty’s medical charts, came to form the main subject of his work. Gradually, the dissected man turns himself into a human landscape. Man, trees and the earth share the common feature of possessing a bark – an écorce –, and all three may be peeled out of their skin as an écorché. A desiccated body is also a expansive landscape, marked with various undulations, orogenies, and cracks. Each rough, bone-like surface recalls Patinir’s rocky landscapes or the calving of the drifting icebergs. Like a river, the venous, arterial or nervous network irrigates plains and estuaries; like clay in the Genesis, muscles are worked up into gorges and buttes.

Following this metaphor, Cédric Le Corf uses vegetal roots as a landscape in which he intertwines porcelain bones, vertebras or kneecaps. In etymological terms, a root is indeed the part of an element set up in another – as in dental root, hair root, or dorsal root. Confronting the raw element of chaos to the mastery of creation, roughness to smoothness, decay to inalterability, the permanence of art to the transience of humankind. Steeped in a Rhineland and Armorican heritage, confronted with the pathos of Grunewald, Baldung, Grien, of the hangmen from Jacques Callot’s Les Grandes Misères de la guerre to the Ankou presiding over the dance of death in Kernascléden’s church, where the animate meets the inanimate, up to the horrors of Sobibor, Cédric Le Corf tries, following the motif, to make sculpture, painting or etching, seep out from their substance.

(Radius-Cubitus - wood et porcelain - 85 x 60 x 15 cm - 2014)

It is therefore with ‘hollow dreams’ that I look today towards this expedition around the islands of Svalbard, in the Spitsbergen Archipelago. Although the human presence is not perceptible in this vast expanse of water illuminated by the sun of the summer solstice, the human body, which is the object of my present studies, apparently seems so far from the primordial ‘Archimedean’ landscapes. It seems, however, evident to be able to connect these hostile stretches with the man-landscape, which is the primary motive of my work. The translucency of the ice can indeed be easily compared to the transparency of the epidermis, revealing the blood networks, the nerves and the pulsation of the heart rhythm, heart, lung and spirit at the same time, by a skilful play of the imagination.

In the end, immersion in this environment outside of space- time undoubtedly allows to be born again in the original element, the same way as the man who emerges from the water. Platonic reminiscence of man, not as a ‘fallen angel who remembers the heavens’, but as a ‘promoted sh that remembers the waters’.

These few reflections will form the basis for my research. Since the floating workshop’ will be equipped with a small press for line engraving, I will realize dry points on zinc, xylographs and a series of photos of these virginal landscapes with a pinhole to crystallize them during this residence. Back at the studio, I will put my bag filled with images and sensations down, richer with these events.

Nelly Stetenfeld,

Engraver

www.nellystetenfeld.com

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(photo: Agnès Prévost)

The animal is at the center of my work. I try to explore chimeric worlds that and their source in the scientific and medical illustrations. I therefore create a personal, dreamlike mythology. I develop research and creation through engravings, drawings and animations.

Selected according to aesthetic, as well as symbolical and affective criterias, each animal is taken through the the ideal distorting prism. It is then modelled up in an other reality shape ruled by its own code. Cut, broken, fragmented, the animal is re-built and finds again a tangible reality through the different mediums that are engraving and drawing. With a method founded on the descriptive drawing and the collection of naturel items and pictures, I try to add up to the real world cartography the one of the dreamworld, a world of metamorphosis constantly in motion.

Each of my artwork is like a new chapter to a personal and artistic tale that I intend to pursue : a floating and poetical universe, rooted in our reality and exploring a different world ordering, I wish to lead viewers to that place. Along with my studio work, my research is fed by many trips and discoveries over the world, more particularly around Souh-East Asia and China. These experiences have confirmed that new eld residencies encourage us in developing imagination and creation, by confronting us to nature and forcing us beyond ourselves. They are the witnesses of a contemporary initiatory journey and they are in my opinion the ideal way to re-discover the world and what’s at stake.

(Cachalot - mine de plomb sur papier - 50 x 65 cm - 2016)

With its specific characteristics, the Spitzberg art residency offers the ideal frame to pursue my work.I will be able to carry on crayon and watercolour sketch books, as well as a serie of direct carving engravings. The drawings made on board of the Knut during a month will become a bank of images and data, genesis of the making of more advanced etchings in the workshop. Moreover, given my experience in the eld of artistic publishing, I wish to produce a journey log-book: it will show my experience, my notes, drawings and pictures and the core of my hybrid design work

Résidence d'artistes au Spitzberg