Since my earliest explorations, childhood has traversed my work like an invisible structure, a habitat I have never ceased to map. It is my "fil rouge," the tenuous yet indissoluble thread that unites my gestures and obsessions. I have been pulling this thread since my early series. It links the petrified ritual of Birthday to You, where the time of celebration seemed broken, to my current project in progress, Without Wings, where numerous children’s camisoles will evoke abandonment. The former explored the staging of amputated greeting cards where the "happy" is eclipsed. As for the latter, it delves into the seclusion of lack by exploring the white, empty child’s camisole, hung on the wall as a symbol of a disembodied system. I invite you to visit my personal website, www.mariefrancecournoyer.com, to explore the presence of this theme throughout the evolution of my work.
For my part, childhood is the framework of the adult. It is during this period that our foundations, thresholds, and enclosures are drawn. My artistic approach consists of making this architecture tangible, not through force, but through the exaltation of fragility. As for the writer Christian Bobin, the fragility of childhood is not, in my view, a weakness, but the very condition of human beauty and truth. By choosing mundane, worn, or broken materials, I seek to celebrate that which is delicate, ephemeral, and sovereign within the minuscule.
In my compositions, the gesture is intended to be raw and spontaneous, reaching for the truth "within the visor" of the child. It is a refinement of imperfection. With the project Without Wings, this research becomes radicalized. By stiffening camisoles to turn them into empty shells, I give a body to the void left by the lack of attachment. My materials, the textile that freezes or the thread that sutures, are chosen for their ability to recount vulnerability.
Childhood is the place where the structure is most exposed. By exhibiting these fragments of absence, I am not illustrating the past; I am inviting a reconciliation with our own architecture. To accept the cracks in our foundations is to transform a forced seclusion into a chosen sanctuary, where the primary gesture becomes a word of light upon the invisible.
This quest could not exist without my constant dialogue with literature. It is, as much as thread or textile, a fundamental material of my process. From the silences of Virginia Woolf, the economy of words and gestures of Emily Dickinson, the "objeu" of Francis Ponge, to the sensitivity to detail in Dominique Fortier’s writing, the texts I inhabit dictate the measure of my works. Like Christian Bobin, I believe that writing and the sculptural gesture share the same mission: to watch over that which is fragile. Literature offers me the words to name what matter tries to hold. By linking these voices to my work on childhood, I seek to create a space where the book and the object meet to form an archive of the heart, an architecture where one can finally read between the lines of the void.