Visit Laurence Le Constant's workshop
BIO :
Group shows :
2022 : Homo Faber, Venise
2021 : Paradiso, Group Show Galerie Géraldine Banier
2020 : Group show : Bizarro à Saint-Germain // Les fantomes du cinéma
2019 : Duo show : Canons de beauté // Galerie Géraldine Banier
2015 : To be Venus // Galerie Géraldine Banier
2015 : Art Paris Art Fair : Galerie Géraldine Banier
2013 : Bizarro : The Lost world //Galerie Géraldine Banier
2012 : Bizarro // Galerie Géraldine Banier
2012 : Art Ball // Dallas Museum of Art
2011 : First exhibition at the Galerie Géraldine Banier
2010 : Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Cachan.
Solo exhibition :
2022 : A call to heaven - Galerie Géraldine Banier
2014 : Her Garden - Galerie Géraldine Banier
Collections :
2014 : Collection of Bill Pallot
2012 : Dallas Museum of Art
Studies :
2006-2004 : Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne.
2003-2004 : Degree in Plastic Arts at University of Paris I.
2000 : Degree in Textile Design
1996 : School certificate in Fine Arts.
The work of Laurence Le Constant sketches out the contours of a bewitching world, populated by singular hybrid figures. Childhood fantasies are revived, lulled by cosmic legends and tales from which she borrows many references. Both figurative and dreamlike scenes are presented in a multifaceted way. Situated in this vaporous gap between the imaginary and the real, the pieces created open onto essential metaphysical and identity questions.
The use of noble materials, precious wood, crystals, feathers, coral and fossilized animal teeth, keeps the symbolic power intact. If the visual appeal operates immediately, the works only reveal their ambivalent secret in a second phase, when the visual pleasure has passed.
The artist draws on the rich heritage of her training as a cabinetmaker, upholsterer, embroiderer and feather-worker to offer her meandering introspective and her haunting memories with delicate and poetic contours. Dissociation of the body and the spirit is the central subject of study for Laurence Le Constant; she explores this constant duality through the different stages of life: the difficulty of becoming a woman, the decline of becoming old and the transition
from life to death.
In the series My lovely bones, the artist becomes an archaeologist of memory. First-named Dove, Tina and Maria, her vanitas are portraits of prominent women from near and far, echoing her personal genealogy. Each piece is unique and requires hundreds of hours of work. The carefully selected feathers, are glued one by one on a resin base.
Halfway between funerary outsider art and haute couture, the artist sculpts feather like one would weave a cocoon. Incantatory gestures, hypnotic technique, behind the symbols loaded with anxiety, she tries to ward off oblivion. This theme, offering a range of precious relics, oscillates between the most delicate and the emergence of the most archaic and is inspired by La Loba, a Mexican tale where the Wolf-Woman picks up bones belonging to animals in the desert, so that they are not lost to the world.
The purpose is to preserve what remains of those that shape us and thus avoid their actual disappearance. These are figureheads that punctuate her personal history. The given name eventually being the last ceremonial remembrance. Since the exhibition, Her Garden, Laurence Le Constant reconstructs a lost Garden of Eden, conceived as a rite in different nostalgic microcosms gathering the scattered pieces of her psyche.
Text by Anne-Claire Plantey, Artefacts