RESPONSES TO NEW WORKS BY MARILOU CHAGNAUD
Claire Barclay, 2023
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Discussions with Marilou reveal shifts within her practice that correspond to life changing relocations from her home town in France to Montreal then Canberra and now Northern England. These manifest as subtle but noticeable formal differences that I wonder maybe reflect Marilou’s desire for editing and refining her practice when given the opportunity for a fresh start and the possibilities for exploration that each new situation offers up.
There is a strong formal motivation within the work that is seductive in its precise execution and attention to detail. It appeals to our love of repetitive pattern, geometry, symmetry, paired down use of complimentary colour, which seems innately human and is able to communicate across places and times. This perhaps allows Marilou’s work to be reimagined and reinterpreted as it travels with her.
During her residency at VARC, Marilou has also needed to embrace a shift from urban to rural that has forced her practice out of the gallery context. Here there is a different relationship with formal exploration, one less able to be defined or controlled by conventional presentation and engagement. This place of moorland is a reminder of our transience, our smallness and our vulnerability, and being here raises questions about how we assert control over our environment and our lives.
The experience of making artwork through the raw winter months has given shape to Marilou’s artworks that feel very rooted in this place, despite their materials and forms being strongly suggestive of the man-made. The hi-tech white and orange ripstop nylon commonly used in parachutes has a degree of brightness only ever fleetingly encountered within ‘the natural world’. At first her enormous chequered sewn fabric pieces look so out of place within the rustic heritage and wild natural habitat, instead reminiscent of colours and motifs associated with signals or warnings, like those adopted by emergency services or armed forces. As they are experienced, however, these pieces seem to interact with their context in ways that provoke feelings, thoughts and observations about our own relationship with this place or places similar.
In her performance piece, ‘Mapping Air’, the sewn ripstop was formed by both resistance and synchronicity between wind, fabric and human bodies. This of course was not a static process, instead the fabric was manipulated through constant fighting or dancing to produce unique dynamic shapes and a morphing of its geometric pattern. The force of the air determined the mood of the piece and the nature of interactions, sometimes violent sometimes steady.
The thrill and interplay experienced by the performance participants will endure through memory and has been captured and shared in the documentation. The fabric piece now takes a new form within the exhibition but is somehow imbued with a layer of meaning through its former use. The wind however seems not to be affected by the intervention, although we are reminded through the work how human activity affects on a more profound scale.
Marilou and I have coincidentally, though not simultaneously, lived in Australia where we both found that being present within the natural wild environment provided a more authentic way to engage with somewhere that to us felt very culturally different. Here at VARC Marilou has found that immersing herself within this unique landscape has revealed much about its history and the relationships between people and this place.
As artists, when invited to make artwork in response to specific places, we have to engage with the unfamiliar and embrace the unexpected. This can feel risky, but is always enlightening. When Marilou found historic images within the collections at the local Otterburn Textile Mill of long lengths of woven cloth being stretched by tenterhooks across the hillside to dry, it must have seemed like one of these inspiring serendipitous moments.
Likewise the daily walks in all weather drew her attention to the abundance of lichens within this habitat and sparked a newfound interest and creative enquiry into these phenomenal organisms and their potential as art material. This in turn led to departures in her processes of art making and experimentation with silk fabric dyeing using dyes she has made from lichens.
Temporariness and lightness of touch on the environment is of importance in reading Marilou’s works at Highgreen. Despite their large-scale and bold arresting physicality, her works are not territorial or attempting to harness nature. Instead I think they attempt to understand points of intersection, where we feel at one with or other to nature, place and community. The nature of belonging is so complex, individual and fraught with inherited issues, so to be encouraged to think of belonging as a gathering of experiences that imbue our lives with layers of meaning, is perhaps a positive approach to feeling grounded and connected. Marilou’s works explore this in refreshingly open and inquisitive ways.