Hélène COQ
In 2018, after a very long hiatus and thanks to a few decisive encounters, I returned to the artistic practices of my youth: drawing, painting, then photography.
Thirty years of architectural projects had shaped my creativity: a complex exercise in which part of the talent consists in preserving the beautiful original idea until its concretization, all along a path strewn with regulatory, financial, technical, human obstacles (and sometimes assets).
With intuitive painting first, then photography, I experienced the joy of a liberated, light production, without any project this time, to live in the present. The surprise of the results invites me to go further, to explore, to play, to surprise myself again.
External, benevolent and encouraging eyes were placed on my images. Thus, the additional pleasure would be to share them... until I conceived a first exhibition.
For me, who until then had the feeling of flitting around aimlessly, how to organise these eclectic productions in order to show them? How to understand and interpret them? By spotting Ariadne's threads in them, which are quite obvious in the end. Strange spaces with unremarkable scales populate my images, the border between the photographed and the drawn is sometimes tenuous. Light plays a particular role, revealing quasi-sculptures, just like in my architectural projects. I like to play with materials, colour and value relationships, unexpected compositions, abstraction and evocation.
FUNGI !
My footsteps take me back to the woods of my childhood, dark and dense slopes, full of life, which offered us firewood, young shoots from the coppice and ferns for our huts, chestnuts cooked in the fireplace, and up to 22 species of mushrooms on our plates.
I walk through this small territory almost every day, and of all its occupants it is the mushrooms that catch my eye the most. My equipment: a basket, a stick, and my camera with its macro lens.
The mysterious reign of the Fungi, neither animal nor vegetable, conjures up a whole ancestral phantasmagoria. It is a question of life and death, shamanic powers, pleasure and danger.
It is their aesthetic that I want to capture, sometimes graphic and geometric, very often sensual. The light underlines organic architectures, reveals surprising landscapes. Forgetting their scale, cliffs, caves or arches appear to my eyes.
A way of playing, of course, but also a tribute to the incredible underground life from which these fascinating mushrooms emerge.
Hélène COQ
In 2018, after a very long hiatus and thanks to a few decisive encounters, I returned to the artistic practices of my youth: drawing, painting, then photography.
Thirty years of architectural projects had shaped my creativity: a complex exercise in which part of the talent consists in preserving the beautiful original idea until its concretization, all along a path strewn with regulatory, financial, technical, human obstacles (and sometimes assets).
With intuitive painting first, then photography, I experienced the joy of a liberated, light production, without any project this time, to live in the present. The surprise of the results invites me to go further, to explore, to play, to surprise myself again.
External, benevolent and encouraging eyes were placed on my images. Thus, the additional pleasure would be to share them... until I conceived a first exhibition.
For me, who until then had the feeling of flitting around aimlessly, how to organise these eclectic productions in order to show them? How to understand and interpret them? By spotting Ariadne's threads in them, which are quite obvious in the end. Strange spaces with unremarkable scales populate my images, the border between the photographed and the drawn is sometimes tenuous. Light plays a particular role, revealing quasi-sculptures, just like in my architectural projects. I like to play with materials, colour and value relationships, unexpected compositions, abstraction and evocation.
FUNGI !
My footsteps take me back to the woods of my childhood, dark and dense slopes, full of life, which offered us firewood, young shoots from the coppice and ferns for our huts, chestnuts cooked in the fireplace, and up to 22 species of mushrooms on our plates.
I walk through this small territory almost every day, and of all its occupants it is the mushrooms that catch my eye the most. My equipment: a basket, a stick, and my camera with its macro lens.
The mysterious reign of the Fungi, neither animal nor vegetable, conjures up a whole ancestral phantasmagoria. It is a question of life and death, shamanic powers, pleasure and danger.
It is their aesthetic that I want to capture, sometimes graphic and geometric, very often sensual. The light underlines organic architectures, reveals surprising landscapes. Forgetting their scale, cliffs, caves or arches appear to my eyes.
A way of playing, of course, but also a tribute to the incredible underground life from which these fascinating mushrooms emerge.
