| Project title: | Moving Mountains: Rupture and Healing |
| Location: | Open Studio, Bordeaux, France |
| Date(s): | 28 June – 5 July 2024 |
Artist Statement
Katy Billaud-Denneullin-Wright is an artist based in Bordeaux. Moving Mountains is a visual interpretation of the sublime and majestic element of the Mountain, intending to tell a story of a deep ancestral connection with Nature by ‘borrowing’ from the landscape and translating it into a new artistic language.
Equally, evoking through the title the powerful potential of achieving the seemingly impossible, the Mountain serves as a symbol for Nature and metaphor for the determination necessary in the face of an ecological crisis.
Based upon onsite research in the Pyrenees Mountain range in the south of France the project unravels a sense of unease and dislocation. Explored through the dichotomies of rupture and healing ‘Moving Mountains’ speaks of intersection, resonance and hope.
Contextual Statement
With a grave concern for the well-being of our Planet Earth, a capacity for care and an instinctive need to find personal balance, the foundations of this work underline my artistic practice. Further desire to break away from an Urban comfort zone and a passion for running in the Mountains naturally sparked the creation of this project.
Living in the city centre, I am often overwhelmed by human hubris and the incessant acceleration that is both exhausting and non-sustainable. I believe that connection with Nature is an essential antidote for well-being and personal balance. Ongoing research through my artistic practice explores how balance and hope can resonate through the personal, local and global.
A cyclic process of exploratory work within my studio from both memory, location drawings and contextual research to regular Mountain visits ‘recharging’ in experience and feeling is the procedure for this project. My practice typically functions with the use of dichotomy to further articulate ideas of balance. Rupture and healing have emerged as two major themes within the research leading the work into new territory, pushing previous boundaries and exploring the threshold between painting and other materials.
Ideas sustainability are interwoven within the work as I re-awaken and re-use to suggest an alternative to the saturation of our consumerist disposable society. An alternative which is both gratifying and rewarding but also leading to a feeling of connection and in turn, belonging. Our intentions are influenced as we pay more attention and acknowledge a World where Nature can be recognised as a gift to which we have a responsibility. Theorist Donna Haraway’s conceptualisation of
“Response-ability,” links back to ideas of care and world making in a collective sense. Attention, sharing, caring, borrowing are all present within this visual research project.
That our attention may be under threat feels like an abstract subject, difficult to grasp, lacking materiality, however another is living in a new geological era – the Anthropocene. In ‘All Art is Ecological,’ Timothy Morton’s essay discusses how ecological thinking captures a non-confinable “not-quite-reality,” essentially comparing the ungraspability of art and living in a catastrophe. Through my practice I too try to fathom the reality of living in the Anthropocene.
Personal collaboration with Nature is evident within this body of work though to successfully resonate this project can become “Moving mountains together,” thus must continue to develop into the realm of human collaboration – where the possibilities of collectively caring and paying attention are limitless.
Project Documentation
More information