(French-Dutch, b.1998, London)
My name is Apolline. As a highly sensitive person, I foster a sense of belonging to the world through an acute engagement with its sights, sounds, and textures. At present, I am a bricoleuse exploring the act of listening to materials and their memories.
My work lies on three threads: Surrealism, the cleaning process, and the built environment. Ghostly elements — aqueous spills, drips, webs, flesh, faces, goat eyes, fauna, and decay — frequently emerge in my explorations. I understand these as undercurrents of an upbringing built on the maintenance of immaculate surface. Tangentially, my inspirations come from peeling paint, torn posters, oxidisation and the ongoing Surrealist movement. These artists heavily inspire me for their use of ‘détournement:’ the Situationist practice of tweaking symbol and learnt association to the point of political indefinition. {1} I frequently employ this tool in both my art and my writing.
Each project is an attempt to self-educate through material collaboration: I explore the point at which a material is erased to better understand its three dimensionality: here is a finite and political resource, here is an object of social exchange (what becomes valuable is the insight you bring), and here is a stranger to human design. If it approaches representations of reality without ever fully arriving, it's because I’m trying to make space for a nuance there I think we’ve lost.
Collaging material explorations with motifs associated with choice, belief, humour and caution are my attempts at empowering these bricolages into something worthy of attention. Rich (or arresting) in their capacity to hijack notions of value, and strange in their potential to expose how we seem to look ‘for’ rather than ‘at’. As a result, I often work with found objects, sites of disrepair, and waste material from previous projects as valuable starting points.
To value a texture
akin to diaphanous relics {2}
(The ear yells to eyes) where to look ?
A joy-noir atopic eroded our city of skins. {3}
We coaxed up a land with our bones and our blues
for a wild Mélusine to appear in the factory loos {4}
Mistaking her produce for products
or kin
I confess, in the mess,
Your traces I sieve
Look not on her sins, but on the waste of these worths
In this murky keep our freedom sings
Why protect us from all disparity?
We could make in joyful scope
For the loving of a shedding dream
we might
the truth is
To suck dumb on employment
{was?} the youth and the dream
May your youth be the wisdom to build as you glean.
Guy Debord, Gil J. Wolman, Les Lèvres Nues n.8, May 1956
Diaphanous: translucent
‘Joy-noir:’ delighting in the cinematic horror; atopic: referring to eczema.
Mélusine is a mythical character from medieval French folklore (Jean d’Arras, Le Roman de Mélusine, 1478). Mother, builder, forest nymph and part-time mermaid, she haunts built environments whenever they undergo a change of hands.