Amélie Proulx: Les horizons marqueurs, 2022-2023
Les horizons marqueurs, 2022-2023
Hands that collect, manipulate, display, assemble, hold: so many evocations of the gestures that permitted this vast project to take form. In the course of her research, Amélie Proulx meticulously selected, ground, crushed or pulverized hundreds of rocks and minerals in order to integrate them into her porcelain and explore the possibilities of firing them. The colours, textures and shapes that resulted then allowed her to enrich the already profoundly material experience of ceramics, making Nature at once the subject and object of her work.
Anne-Sophie Blanchet, art historian
Les horizons marqueurs, 2022-2023, porcelain, glaze, fired rocks and minerals, series of 50 hands approximately 8 x 8 x 8 inches each, photo credit: Guy L’Heureux
Les Cendres D’Une Montagne (The Ashes of a Mountain), 2022
Seizing time that passes: this is what the video Les cendres d’une montagne (“The Ashes of a Mountain”) offers us. Through experimentation, Amélie Proulx discovered that certain rocks metamorphose in a radical way when they are subjected to extremely high temperatures. Some change their colour or vitrify, while others, like this one, pulverize themselves several hours later. The artist thus accelerates a phenomenon that would have been spread out over hundreds, even thousands of years. However, beyond these experimental and technical considerations, the video is perhaps above all an invitation to contemplation and recollection. With gentleness and poetry, Amélie calls into question what we might have believed to be eternal … even the immutable does not seem to escape the work of time.
Anne-Sophie Blanchet, art historian
Les cendres d’une montagne, 2022, video, 5 :40. Photo credits for the installation stills : Guy L’Heureux
