https://www.gwengerard.com/c-vague-s
The installations "Divagué.e.s", "Elle Ael", "Cabossé.e.s", "Portrait par Trois", "Silhouette Au Coin", " Poché.e.s" , " La Sillhouette relit", " Ombres en Mouvement" , " A L'Orée", "Re- Coin" grouped under the title "C.Vague.S" speak of my aunt diagnosed with schizophrenia in the early 1950s. I spent a month with her and my grandmother in Brest between my 7 and a half to 8 and a half months. But that was never told to me.
After undergoing the annihilating psychiatric treatments of that time, my aunt spent most of her life in the Morlaix psychiatric hospital.In the 1980s, following abortive art studies, I decided to be part of "the so-called active life". Through my next-door neighbor, I learned about the nursing profession in the psychiatric sector whose studies were paid. (which has not been the case since 1992) and got involved.
For nearly thirty years, parallel to my activity as a plastic artist, I therefore practiced that of nursing in the psychiatric sector and then of art therapist, a profession which also allows me to finance my artistic practice. Remaining aware of their inadequacy and opposition: one linked to the disorder of creativity and the other to the order of knowledge and the institution, I chose to combine them, to find bilateral correspondences, in particular between process of creativity and identity reconstruction (* 2) while questioning the principles of unity and harmony.
When my aunt died in May 2008, I spontaneously picked up her things: a suitcase full of photographs. Most of them were from people I didn't know, because in my youth we never visited this part of the family.
Throughout my life I was born in 1956, I did not understand all these knots that attached me to my aunt and to Breton soil, yet it never ceased to call me in my flesh, to surprise me while beyond my comprehension. I was just seeing a sort of analogy, correspondence that often had a special relationship with patients with schizophrenia and a particular attraction to theories about the origin of the emotional connection.
These photos with the precise dates and places inscribed on their backs, I looked at them many times without seeing anything in particular. The 2020 lockdown made me dwell on them and allowed me to look at them at greater length.And that's when I understood this happy month and this access to happiness that my aunt had transmitted to me, this indelible mark left in my being: mind and body combined.
These installations that are part of the same “C.Vague.S” body of work served as a starting point for photos that my aunt kept close to her throughout her life. I designed this series as a "dialogue between water and wind", where the images of my aunt are intertwined with the women through sculptures, installations: a way to join our memories, our stories in a new account, of give body to a life left in institutional shadow. For this series, the shadow is transformed into a source of light, the one that shines and is recognized. Linked to the meeting of water and wind creating this perpetual movement of ebb and flow, the "C-Vague. S" installations are like eternal return where "This is the new always old, and of old always new ” (*1).
(*1)Auguste Blanqui - L’Éternité par les astres, 1872
(* 2) Succinctly, during psychic decompensation phenomena, different reconstruction processes whether it is dreamlike, fabulation, hallucinations, interpretations can be likened to plastic processes such as analogy, diversion, metaphor , the cut up etc. In both cases, a singular associative principle links the constituents together to access a story, qualified as delusional, and therefore incomprehensible, in a psychiatric field and poetic in art in general. As an art therapist, my plastic practice, linked to the world of the image and its associations, allowed me to access these imaginary worlds, to feel them, to consider them above all in their poetic aspect and thus to recognize them as a communicating story. Inspired by this, I have always been interested in the paradoxical alliance of elements that question the notions of causality, univocity, and their "unusual" links opening, in my eyes, new spaces and possibilities.
“C.Vague.s”
“ANTRE TROIS”
