• Colle di Bordocheo, Segromigno in Monte
Via di Piaggiori Basso 123, Capannori

La rêveuse rêvant d’une rêveuse rêvant
Installation by Tiphaine Calmettes

“The dreamer who dreams the dreamer who dreams”: in the small secret garden of Colle di Bordocheo, an old rural architecture once used to catch birds to sell at the market becomes a dream space and an observatory of “living territories.” 

A seat, a triclinium, a psychotherapist’s chaise-longue? The furniture becomes Tiphaine Calmettes’ pretext for making sculptural forms strongly connected with local and ecological craft techniques. During her Lucchese residency, the artist learned to work with bamboo, harvested right from the farm’s small forest and used to bring to life an object that connects with its surroundings. Where does culture begin and nature end? Where does nature begin and culture end? The repertoire of forms draws on the history of art and design to revisit eras when the connection to plants and animals was ubiquitous in ornament; it is an attempt, for the artist, to understand gestures and processes rather than a desire for perfectionist reproduction. 

Sit down, get comfortable, daydream.

Tiphaine Calmettes

Tiphaine Calmettes works around the attempts of communication between the human being and his environment or beyond through the objects which serve our vital activities: feeding, housing, caring. Through the practice of sculpture and installation, she seeks to set in motion both the forms and her research. A way of considering the production process as a living organism in direct relation with the spaces that welcome it, the beings that meet it and vice versa. She first of all tries to develop a form of life and organicity in her works. His interest then extended to the animation of artefacts both in their relationship to their uses and to their environment, that is, the way in which the production of objects and architectures are animated both by the living species or energies that inhabit them, as well as by the physical or psychic interactions they have with what surrounds them.

Her creative process is an object of conversation with the history of know-how and its reactivation in the present context. Thus, attentive to the context of production of her work, Tiphaine Calmettes collaborates with various craftsmen (rock cutter, raw earth mason, alchemist…). The non-formal, reversible, ephemeral techniques install the animation of life forms through performative actions. In the form of “edible narration”, his objects and stories come to life by revisiting sharing, commensality, through flavors and encounters.

Her works have been exhibited at La Panacée MOCO (Montpellier), Zoo galerie (Nantes), CAC La Traverse (Alfortville), Kunstwerk Carlshütte (Büdelsdorf, Germany), Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the Lyon Biennial 2019, etc. In 2020, he won the AWARE prize