Séverine Bourgeois

Title (Left) : Ökoton

Medium: Ink, gold, graphite and black stone on paper

Dimensions : 30 x 40 cm

About the artwork:

Ecotone: ecological transition zone between two ecosystems.
A laboratory of the edge which questions demarcations and oppositions: light and darkness, visible and hidden, abstract and figurative, mineral and animal. The reversal of benchmarks alters the potential recognition of the subject.
The touches of gold delimit the passage from one state to another, while adding an element that thwarts the perception: an adornment transformed into camouflage.
The references are upset, the many possible pareidolias enrich the meaning of the images and the approach. The limits are transfigured into spaces in their own right. The living becomes a landscape and a place of meditation.

About Séverine

Visually impaired since I was twelve years old, I have learned to see differently. I have always questioned the notion of look and phenomenology. How things appear in front of my eyes? In what way the message is interpreted, distorted, disrupted? The first difference lies at the heart of the vision. Because at one time or another, there is an event. Something occurs, comes into the world through my altered vision. The apparition.
I have always played with body, nature, perception. A poetry of distortion.
I use words and images to explore limits and create hybrid universes in which my deep interest in anatomy, botany and zoology shines through. I create paradoxes, additions that subtract, upheavals and shifts. I invent composites, modify scales, abuse boundaries and rigid rules of perspective. The return to the body without recourse to the body. This one is at the center of the reflection even if it is sometimes absent, physically.
From the word is born the image. First of all, there is the text, tangible proof of the idea to be explored, and which frequently fades behind the drawing. Ink is my favorite medium, the one with which it all begins. Other techniques can help support the concept, but the crude and symbolic contrast of ink on paper remains an intrinsic necessity in my artistic creation process.
My explorations rarely translate into a single image. The multiplicity of experiences and results fully participate in the course of the idea’s transcription. I tend to establish visual collections of dots, lines and flat tints from which my own perceptions are born.
I like to cheat my illness, a method of trying to control my helplessness in the face of its inexorable degradation.
Like a challenge, my little revenge.
I have fun with the dangers of the limit.
I live for a few moments in the dark.
I always see in the blur.
Disturbed body and blurred vision.