Interview Victoire Inchauspé, discovery of the SAM Prize 2022 (English)
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“Nature has become a way for me to create a language that is understandable by all, beyond differences, in which I would like everyone to be able to find themselves.”
The visual artist Victoire Inchauspé just graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris and is nominated for the SAM Prize for Contemporary Art 2022. This prize, sponsored by Sam Art Projects in partnership with the Palais de Tokyo (modern and contemporary art institution in Paris), rewards every year a French artist or an artist living in France. At 24 years old, Victoire Inchauspé is the youngest finalist in the history of the prize. She is nominated alongside seven other artists. Artists who were nominated in the past include Ivan Argote, Gaëlle Choisne, Abraham Poincheval, Chloé Quenum, Clément Cogitore and Camille Henrot.
Victoire Inchauspé is an emerging artist to keep an eye on. She won the Prix SARR in 2021 and exhibited her work numerous times in France and London, notably at Paris Photo, Galerie Sator, Hatch exhibitions and the Bastille Design Center. In the themes she addresses and the techniques she uses, Victoire explores the eternal recommencement of the cycle of life, marked by the death and rebirth of all natural things. Her poetic and melancholy pieces play with many dualities, including the duality that exists between strength and fragility. Her work is marked by a great deal of delicacy and a strong representation of vulnerability. It also calls for a return to romanticism in which Victoire Inchauspé evokes universal themes such as carelessness, courage, illness and death. Above all, she seeks to provoke reflection in the audience by immersing them in her unique universe.
More than two years after our first conversation, we talked about her practice, her graduation from the Beaux-Arts de Paris, the five years she spent in the school, her departure to New York for the prestigious Unlimited and NARS foundation residencies and much more…
How did you find out that you were nominated for the SAM award?
Sandra Hegedüs saw my piece “And it was all Yellow” at the Refresh exhibition organized by Hatch. This piece is a wax painting with mimosas inside. We met and after talking to her about my work she suggested I be a finalist. I am very honored to be selected among this list of inspiring artists, it’s a great opportunity.
What piece of work would you like to present for the SAM prize?
The finalists propose an exhibition project for the Palais de Tokyo, inspired by a trip of several months to a destination outside Europe or North America. The artist whose project is selected travels to the chosen destination and then returns to make their exhibition. I chose to present a project inspired by a trip in Japan.
How do you feel being recognized with awards and honors for your work?
It’s encouraging and I’m happy to have the opportunity to show my work and make connections with people who will help me evolve my world. I realize that awards are not an end in themselves, I remain focused on what I want to create.
There are recurring themes in your work, such as the idea of the life cycle, childhood and nature. How do you explore these themes?
I have a multidisciplinary practice, I use and transform different materials such as wax, wood, milk, salt, glass, water and bronze. I often mix materials from industrialization with organic materials, looking for a form of balance.
I was lucky to grow up outside of the cities, nature has had an obvious influence on my work and my sensitivity. It is omnipresent in my pieces, I give it my own interpretation. Nature has become a way for me to create a language that is understandable by all, beyond differences, in which I would like everyone to find themselves.
You often bring together several elements of nature, including flowers and animals. What signification do you give to these elements in your work?
My work brings together elements of nature that represent this duality between strength and fragility. It is often the same animal images that I use and transform: deer, bats, spiders, birds, bees. I like to work with this idea of “unloved beings”.
Flowers are also almost always present in my installations, including mimosa, poppy, thistle, sunflower and edelweiss. Each flower carries a particular symbolism, they are matrices of memories. By drying them, I freeze them in an immortality. They can appear in different forms, from the seed to the decomposing flower, which brings us back to this idea of cycle.
Can you talk about “Separate ways together”, the work you presented at your your Beaux-Arts de Paris graduation?
“Separate ways together” was an immersive installation that brought together the central elements of my practice: the cycle of life, rebirth, death, the balance between the ephemeral and the eternal and between strength and vulnerability.
It was a pristine landscape in which the audience could walk, sit, lie down… I was inspired by deers that lose their antlers every year and are left defenseless. This period of vulnerability in deers interests me, because they are forced to find a way to protect themselves. I imagined that they took refuge in cocoons for a time of pause, while waiting for their antlers to regenerate and for life to return to normal. I explored this idea of a metamorphosis, of the caterpillar turning into a butterfly, applied to the deer. The audience really took the time to sit and walk through the installation, it created a very special atmosphere.
The paintings “And it was all Yellow” are made of wax in I imprisoned dried mimosas. They are like pieces of ice in which the mimosa, the first flower of spring and a symbol of femininity and solar energy, has been captured. The wax has a chilling effect, suggesting that it will melt and the flower will be reborn.
For some of your pieces, it is impossible to know how the material will evolve, if the wax will blacken or how the ice will melt, for example. Do you deliberately leave a lot of doubt in the evolution of your pieces?
I like this notion of doubt, between presence and absence. I also like not always controlling the material and letting it live. The wax paintings are in mutation, because the elements that compose them are perishable: the wax has already started to bubble with the heat, we don’t know how the flowers will evolve. This piece is almost alive.
Your work is both evolving and tending towards a balance and stability. The notion of life cycle encompasses both aspects. Can you explain the importance of balance for you?
For me, the purpose of art is to question and to make people feel emotions. I think it’s important to find a balance between the things that are going well and the things that are going badly in our lives and manage to move forward despite that. Many of my pieces have this contradictory energy and ambivalent references to nature.
The notion of collecting also comes up often in your work…
Yes, completely, the notion of finding and collecting is important. I find objects a bit like finding memories, whether it’s the shedding of deer antlers or the flowers I pick… I also spend a lot of time at garage sales looking for objects. I try to recreate a story with the objects I find and to give back some affection and meaning to them.
The relationship that the living have with the idea of death seems to be a subject that particularly inspires you, especially the feelings of absence after presence, remembrance and acceptance. In exploring this topic, you navigate between feelings of anxiety and wisdom. What do you think about this?
The transition from presence to absence is something the mind must process. When an attachment is formed, it is quite difficult to let go of it, especially at that moment when the physical matter disappears but the image and memory persists. We call corrosion, deflation or disintegration the phenomenon that occurs when materials disappear and objects go through the equivalent of a life cycle. All physical matter starts from nothing, takes on a concrete form and perishes, then fades from memory. The studio is a good place to see death as a change of state and not a fate. Perhaps this is why there are found objects in my sculptures: deer antlers, shells, flowers… These objects seem so much more alive than those produced in the studio. Objects that I find have the potential to return to the world and resume their activity. Even a dead bee is more alive than a replica of an aluminum flower.
It seems like you try to play with the viewers’ different senses when they look at your work.
I am trying to develop this aspect more and more in my work, using the smell of milk, the sound of water that you can’t see but can imagine and the feeling of salt under your feet for example. I am captivated by the things that envelop us, rather than those that we can hold.
Do you often think about the reception of your pieces? Especially the fact that your work may show something very personal to you?
My work is personal but that is not its purpose. I try to translate what moves me, the things I see and face every day. It is about the affect linked to my own reality. For every artist, art is a way of expressing themselves in a different way and every person who creates something necessarily starts from him or her as a person. However, I also create for others. I try to create an emotion and a reflexive experience to the spectators. It was Christian Boltanski who said, “The great thing about Art is that you can only talk about yourself but everyone who looks at your work thinks it was made for him or her.”
Since our conversation in May 2020, a lot has happened. You graduated from the Beaux-Arts, you have exhibited your work several times, in France and in London, and won prizes. Looking back, how do you see these last years?
The last few years have been marked by important milestones from which I have learned a lot. I’m looking forward to the next steps, especially moving to New York.
You have many exciting projects coming up. You have been selected for two prestigious residencies in New York, Residency Unlimited and NARS foundation. Why do you want to go there?
I’ve always been drawn to New York for its crazy energy and diversity. My work will definitely get a new dynamic from living abroad, discovering other ways of thinking and working with the other resident artists. I would like to explore some topics more freely and develop my practice in other mediums there, especially 2D and sound.
In your wildest dreams, what installation or piece would you like to create?
There are so many! I would love to see James Turrell’s “Roden Crater” in Arizona. It’s a celestial observatory in the heart of a volcano that has been extinct for 400,000 years. I would like to create something immersive in nature, it would be a great challenge.
If you could have dinner with three people, living or dead, real or fictional, who would you choose?
Simone Veil, Louise Bourgeois and Lewis Hamilton.
Interview by Emma Renaudin in December 2022
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