Jeanne Rimbert: Sea & Sky, 2024-2025
The sea will keep our memories
What might look like stalagmites emerge from the ground, reassuring symbols of an unchanging earthly anchorage.
They are a mass of fused materials: cracked like arid earth, flowing like water, frothy like foam, cottony like clouds. But don’t be fooled by appearances. Like a forest of masts in the middle of the ocean, my little blue and white boats will take their passengers either to a better future, or to shipwreck and oblivion.
Driven by the promise of a better future, they seek the sun towards a bluer tomorrow. On the black sea, under the white clouds. At the edge of the known world, where “the land and the sea hang together” ¹
The sails, made from worn clothing sewn together, are objects of memory, repositories of their owners’ lives. They are a constant reminder of human tragedies and the fleeting nature of our life plans.
The threads woven between the masts are like the ropes that hoist the sails. They make and break bonds, tie life together, untie life. They repair sails and pierce hearts.
(1) About the ocean, Pythéas de Marseille, 4th century BC
The sky will keep our memories
This display of abstract forms hangs on the wall like so many little clouds. Calling to the invisible, they inspire melancholy in the face of the transience of all things, inviting to contemplation as much as quest.
These sky-coloured amulets are surrounded by the cottony remnants of some childish reverie, whose white nebulae speckled with hope are gradually cracking.
Driven by a meditative process imbued with vulnerability and naivety, I tirelessly weave links of cotton, wool and metal around my grigris, using the lace scraps that my grandmother kept in her sewing box. Symbols of trust lost and regained, they ward off fate and heal wounds.
The knotting or wrapping that I do, both binding and holding, evokes a kind of ritual that transforms the material into an object with meaning and value.
