The Wingless, Family Portrait | Exhibition

Violaine Fayolle

Woodcuts, clay sculptures and screen prints

In March 2014, Violaine Fayolle encountered nature and began collecting pieces of it, specimens, leaves, mosses or shells, pine cones, skeletons… to make a cabinet of curiosities. From naturalist sketches that she fills her notebooks with, she created a species of hybrid birds, the déailes, which allow her to ask central questions.

These are birds with wings but which are unfortunately ineffective for flying. These strange birds, deprived of a part of their nature, must then find another meaning to their lives. Metaphors of humans sometimes disoriented in the face of the changes in the contemporary world, the Désailés live in a revisited nature, shell, vine tendril or flamboyant tree.

After creating about forty individual Désailés using the woodcut technique, she sought to give them ancestors. Their names are Petronille, Léopold, Eugénie or Philastère. The ancestors were certainly capable of flying, and perhaps they are responsible, in one way or another, for this impediment that their descendants must face. Portraits presented in old oval frames, woodcuts enhanced with watercolor, they have each learned from a full life and their faces reflect the mysteries that they have been able to live, undergo or understand of this complex world. They look at us as much as we question them and sometimes reveal a little of these mysteries.

The Offspring, the next generation trying to adapt to this situation, are swept up in the turmoil and perhaps begin to fly, carried along by gusts of wind, a storm or their adolescent games.