step 4 - Lowering the fracture, 2017

Clay, 43 x 17 x 13 cm
Mountains flush themselves out of tons of stones on a more or less regular basis. It is erosion through fracking.
The 'Lowering the fracture' project aims to take partial imprints of those cliffs resulting from rockslides.
The stones of which the mountain freed itself created cuts in the rock. I come to mould those gaps and cavities.
Clay came up once again as a way to take the imprints – the same clay I used during step 2 and 3 of 'Repeating the mountain'. This clay, which I collected near my workshop, is the fruit of several hundred thousands years of natural erosion, made of very thin particles extracted from the mountain.
To take the imprints from these gaps means to fill them in : to recreate these ghostly rocks that were taken from the moutain.
The mouldings look like mere pebbles at first sight, however, by carefully choosing which cut to mould, I give direction to the final result and decide to give these reconstituated stones the look of small mountains.
Thus I fall within an approach similar to the ancient Japanese art of 'Suiseki', which purpose is to find stones which shape can echo without any adjustment a small mountain world : a microcosmic realm.
This is how the imprint of a mere cut in a mountain – a macrocosm – gives birth to another mountain – a microcosm.
'Stones are of spectral beauty ; they are dead and fated to act as food for future mountains, in the sandy depths of rivers, lakes and seas.' - Giuseppe Penone