"I always say that light is a paintbrush" — Laura Lamiel

Here we are at the Bourse de Commerce, where your work is currently being shown as part of the exhibition Clair-obscur. What does this theme inspire in you?

When Emma Lavigne asked me to occupy the 24 Display Cases in the Passage, I was in my studio, experimenting extensively with black paints. I was wandering my way through the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and a French volume of poems by his father Arseny Tarkovsky, titled L’avenir seul. I have always been taken with light emerging from the darkness, be this in literature or in painting, a light that seems to surface from beneath shadowy waters. In literature, even in the darkest moments, Jean Genet describes moments of luminous grace. I find that thrilling. 

You are exhibiting a body of work created especially for the Museum’s Display Cases. What was the starting point for this project? How did the particularities of this exhibition space inform your thought process?

There was no starting point. Things simply spring forth each day and become apparent. My works originate with what it is that I want to say. The various levels of my research proved complex, and I composed the pieces with the ensemble of the Display Cases and the circularity of the Passage in mind, so that they would follow on, one from the other, as if this were a musical score. I began working in the studio with a scaled model of a display case, and this helped me grasp its volume and space. I also had to construct the pieces in such a way that they remain fully legible. I have always viewed spaces as a subject to be explored in terms of their three-dimensionality. The Display Cases involved understanding their scale. The fact that they are set off the ground gave me the impression that they were resting on an invisible base.

Can you tell us about the title, “It makes a sound like wings, like leaves, like sand”?

I had worked in my studio for eight months. There was the constant inner noise of my own murmurations and that of the world, which is rather muted in terms of its weight. I have always worked very intuitively. Intuition is my truest compass. Literature has begun to accompany me more and more, and this title came to me one day and helped me organise this circular passageway into three parts. The title is very evocative.

Your works are never closed; forms, materials, and colours reappear from one Display Case to another. They also extend work that you have been conducting since the 1990s, which you call “cells”.  Why did you assign them this term?

The Display Cases are not extension of the cells, but they do share a sense of transparency and of archiving a vocabulary. The cells engage in a poetic communication that is not transmitted by words or gestures, instead by breaths. These are rather large installations that I built using one-way mirrors. What interests me is how two worlds collide, an obverse and an inverse. I have worked a great deal on the perception induced by these reflections, which are anything but ordinary; they open onto a closed space that folds upon itself. This space explores a fairly severe form of confinement, and at the same time, because of the reflection, a kind of infinity. The inverse of the cell reveals the space that opens up. There may well also be something in these pieces that is thinking about chiaroscuro.

You have said that “it takes time to get the distances between objects to talk to one another”. How do your works come to fruition in your studio?

They are like eruptions, at times flashes of intuition that burst forth without my even being able to analyse them. I believe that this particular state of mind is essential. After that, I work on the pieces and they develop. In all humility, I can say that I remain very inspired.

Light is an omnipresent component of your works. What is its importance to you? What does it reveal?

I always say that light is a paintbrush. It depends on each situation and installation. In the specific case of the Display Cases, as is often true for installations spread out over a space, I am looking for different levels of interpretation, close readings that grab the viewer's attention, where light draws the language. When I put a small neon tube in a sleeve, it’s never by chance; it is a precise and deliberate act. I ask that it be looked at. It is a direction, an intention. I strive for a state of reverberation that lends the piece its coherence. Light offers me this coherence. It is truly within this state of reverberation that I situate myself as an artist.  

Can you talk to us about the cotton coats, a key element of your artistic language that appears in several of the Display Cases? What do they represent? 

I don’t remember how and why I started to make them. There is a limit to sewing and stitching water-absorbent cotton, because that’s not what it’s made for. And I love this coat precisely because this isn’t what you’re supposed to do with this material. There’s nothing easy about it. It takes me a lot of time, and it puts me in a particular, meditative frame of mind. There are various levels of interpretation: consolation, protection, even strangeness. Needles are still threaded into the coats, jutting out. The contradiction means that they elude a kind of condition. They’re about something other than lightness. They’re hard to make – I’m constantly pricking my fingers. I make one or two a year, but I don’t know why. There's nothing aseptic or medical about them. The wadding gives them a great sense of softness. This coat is part of all my exhibitions. They all feature a garment, a piece of clothing that one can put on one’s back, and which lends form to an absent body.

On show on the lower level, in the Machine Room, your piece Enlacer la fougère [“To Embrace the Fern”] combines a chair with a strip of rubber. What does this image, this embrace signify? And what about the chair, which often appears in your work?

This piece originates with a gesture, specifically placing this heavy strip of rubber onto a small chair and looking for a way for the strip to remain frozen in the act of falling, as if it were a drape or a fold of fabric. It’s fairly minimalist, but it demands that you look closely at the sculptural form. There is a certain oxymoron to the rigid softness of the rubber being placed on the chair. In this case, it’s really about the presence of a body that isn’t there. Before being unfolded, the chair is a way of asserting the body, namely the body of the artist who is also present. I found this title, To embrace the fern, somewhat enigmatic. This phrase comes from my writings, and perhaps it’s that I feel like caressing plants at this point.