Nymphs, 2012-2013

These symbolical assemblings attempt to connect imagination to nature through artistic means, which act here as media of the Ovidian Metamorphosis, uncovering the magic of myths.
Those nymphs' names and titles are reminiscent of Grecian and Roman mythologies.
The series stemmed from the will to create entomological chimeras by piecing actual bugs and plants together. At the time of these entities' conception, the attention to a peculiar visual cohesiveness guided the crossed pieces to their unification.
The very first bugs I ever came across belonged to the phasmids. In order to survive, those wonders of adaptation have the particular ability to fade into their environment by emulating leaves perfectly, whether dead or green, and even twigs – taking each of their features into account : size, knots and etches.
To bestow wings upon the nymphs, I set up for a long and tricky formula which bleaches the leaves' color and gives them the transparency and fineness of insect wings.
The animal thus can be seen as plant-like whereas, on the other way, the plant can be seen as animal-like.
Operating such herbal transplantation onto an animal body is quite like granting the stick-bugs' evolutive wish to become actual stick. Yet to grant this wish is also to damn them, as these new and whitish limbs give their camouflage away and thus unavoidably make them visible to their natural predators.
Other bugs then made their way into this collection of nymphs : dragonflies, butterflies, silworms' cocoons … as well as other natural materials of the three main worlds of nature – animal, mineral and plant.