Morgane Tschiember «Seuils»
« In 1967 and 1968, I wrote down a verb list as a way of applying various activities to unspecified materials. To roll, to fold, to bend, to shorten, to shave, to tear, to chip, to split, to cut, to sever… The language structured my activities in relation to materials which had the same function as transitive verbs, » Richard Serra declared about his famous « Untitled (Verb List). »
These instructions for automatic (plastic) writing could serve as a script for the entire work of French artist Morgane Tschiember (Brest, 1976). For about ten years she has explored the performative qualities of materials, whether with added value or worthless (metal, foam, glass, plastic), which she subjects to all kinds of impacts. Each of her works thus conceals a series of various efficient actions -to saw, to twist, to weld, to blow, to hang… which form a sort of subtext for it.
Just as Serra revisited a Minimalism marked by rigorism and autonomism, Morgane Tschiember thus unveils the « making » at work behind the forms she produces. Unsurprisingly, her sculptures, three-dimensional paintings, or installations then flaunt their joints, as the « folded space » hanging in the first room of the exhibition epitomizes. Made after a model in folded paper, and unfolded according to a non-orthogonal grid, this mobile made of metal broken down and welded back does not cover over the marks of its fabrication: the black roe-like liquid produced by molten metal quite visibly shows. Hanging at eye level, it may be contemplated literally and figuratively from every angle.
Elsewhere, a new set of puffy glass sculptures, grafted on their very concrete plinth, openly give away the secret of their making. Indeed, the artist -who likes to quote Paul Thek and Michael Asher in the same breath- believes that what makes a (sensitive) surface is also the experience of a body at work as it implicitly appears in the pieces: the glass-blower’s or, in other contexts, the body of the builder tirelessly piling up concrete blocks to obstruct the access to exhibition rooms. The body is also that of the artist, who never balks at handling heavy work or being confronted with the scale of a space, as she does at the end of the exhibition with a monumental, immersive installation sewn with transparent ribbons. Morgane Tschiember’s work essentially plays out in these undetermined, fertile margins, on the edge of an inhabited, sensitive minimalism, of the re-appropriation of the intrinsic values of materials and practices by the artist. « Anything generally hidden during the conception of a piece is revealed and laid bare here, » she explains. « What is usually called defects and constraints is used to develop the physical relation to the work. This connection speaks to me. »
Claire Moulène, March 2012
Bubbles art work was realised with the support of the Cerfav and the CRAC at Sète.
