* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Mathilde Roussel is a French artist based in Paris. Her work is a sensible and symbolic research about the nature of physical life. She is interested in the cyclic metamorphoses that transform organic matter, whether vegetable, animal or human. Furthermore, Roussel interrogates the ways in which time weighs on our body, leaving its traces as an imprint and thus creating an invisible archive of our emotions, a mute history of our existence. To do this, she uses a diversity of materials from paper to fabric, from rubber to graphite. For some of her ephemeral sculptures she uses organic matter such as wheat grass, pollen, sap or milk. Her work becomes a mapping of the body, an anatomy of the time and space inhabited by our fragile presence in the world.
Lives of Grass sculptures show the effects of transformation of the material as a metaphor of the transformation of the body. Time sculpts the forms, makes them change and then decay. The natural world, ingested as food becomes a component of human being. These sculptures strive to show that food, it’s origin, it’s transport, has an impact on us beyond it’s taste. The power inside it affects every organ of our body. Observing nature and being aware of what and how we eat might make us more sensitive to food cycles in the world – of abundance, of famine – and allows us to be physically, intellectually and spiritually connected to a global reality.
