COMMISSION #11 – HÉLÈNE BERTIN
The ritual, like the feast, is a way of transmitting knowledge and values that are significant for a certain community, through repetition of gestures. The hands transform matter, while dancing, the body tells stories. The changing of the seasons is marked by small or large celebrations whose origin we sometimes do not remember, but which help us re-appropriate time and retain its meaning.
For Hélène Bertin fellow at the Academy of France Villa Medici 2023-2024, the study and re-circulation of ancestral gestures are part of her way of understanding sculpture and connecting the creative act with the building of social ties. Making a jar, collecting plants, weaving and dyeing, holding a dance party, are all forms the artist has used in her work, and which always require the participation of other people, In group, the artist is a voice among other voices; sometimes she leads, sometimes she lets herself be led.
Hélène Bertin's IUNO is a leaf collected on a summer's day, on the shores of the river Farfa, a calm and cool space to regain balance. Water is a symbol of female wisdom: the springs were in ancient times inhabited by Nymphs who could utter oracles, dispense advice and, like Egeria, dictate laws. Here, alongside a sickle, the leaf also alludes to the ritual of the harvest, to summer as a time of fullness, maturity and harvest.
Hélène Bertin, Farfaraccio maggiore, 2024, photography
Text by Cecilia Canziani
Hélène Bertin (France, 1989) states a 'deliberately hybird approach', adopted in both artistic production and research. She lives in Cucuron in France and develops her practice by weaving bonds, sharing her own working adventure with enthusiasts while always drawing on the notion of otherness.
By subverting any kind of disciplinary reading, the artist considers gestures and materials as tools or strategies to bring together practices of a diverse nature. In her exhibitions, the combination of different types of objects and actions leads to the construction of a collective narrative. Her publications focus on marginal personalities in order to convey and transmit parallel stories. For Hélène Bertin, a sensitive relationship with the facts of life and work unfolds in the cooperation between the 'realms' of each. What forged this vision of art was her encounter with the practice of the artist Valentine Schlegel, to whom she dedicated a bio-monographic book in 2017, radically renewing the gaze on this artist.