Personal reflection.

My work questions our place in the universe, the fragility of existence and the exchanges between man and his environment. These questions feed my imagination and guide my artistic research.

I first explored the clay, then the glass - neither liquid nor solid - whose ambiguity resonates with the tensions of the world. This malleable material allows me to reveal interplay of appearance, strengths and fragility. A residency in northern France marked a turning point, releasing my practice and directing it towards figuration and multiplication. Cervid antlers invaded my space, establishing themselves as symbols of transformation and adaptation.

Over the years, my work has been enriched by new materials, travel and encounters, rooted in ecological and climatic issues. Yet an almost dreamlike sweetness remains its guiding thread.
My work is a travel diary, both poetic and critical, combining real-life experiences with a look at current events. Inscribed in a civic and ecological consciousness, it acts as a silent and sensitive alarm facing the world's changing. My work is a travel diary, both poetic and critical, combining real-life experiences with a look at current events. As part of a civic and ecological conscience, it acts as a silent and sensitive alarm in the face of global change.

Thierry de Beaumont

Catalog Michèle Perozeni / Thierry de Beaumont

Work in white or the unfinished continent

Before embarking on any philosophical considerations, it is important to put Michèle Perozeni's vast project in the context of her personal road map. All the more so in that for her the act of creating is the materialization of the fleeting or durable emotions, the troughs and the highs, that have marked her through her life.

Having taught for almost twenty-five years at Strasbourg École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs she had sort of put her career as an artist to one side in order to devote herself fully to her students. When Michèle Perozeni accepted in 2010 to embark on the adventure of a residency at Sars-Poteries, she made the huge decision to abandon teaching in order to be able to tackle the intense creative immersion, both expected and premeditated, more serenely. Although an experimentced, artist she felt heself overcome by new feelings, and emotions; her Yellow brick road taking on the form of a massive, untrodden expanse on which each step taken would leave a deep mark.

This blank page to be written, this immaculate vertigo, was to be her field of meditation and action. She called it Inlandsis, after the Danish name for the large ice sheets or continental glaciers found in Greenland and the Arctic, and more commonly known as ice caps. While exploration of light, perception of space and passing time have always been recurring themes in her work, this time she has stood bare before her mental landscape, with glass as her only companion, and confidante. This was a starting point for a new continent. To survive on the ice sheet, you have to keep moving, cast all doubts away and get going. On her Inlandsis, Michèle Perozeni undertook to plant a forest of antlers, the antlers of caribou that move around in dense herds, making these complex and varied forms undulate together to form an ever-changing impression of a single moving mass. Her aim is not necessarily to denounce the increasingly heavy scars made by Man on the surface of this natural mirror, but to express the invisible elements that exist in any empty space, and that can only be perceived in poetry. She has a quantal approach to the universe as a ‘white expanse’' or a mass of blackness that can only be defined by what it is not, our limited human senses still being incapable of detecting it.

This residency was also inspired by another fleeting image: that of the dark silhouettes of four trees looming out of the mist that she noticed two years ago, from the windows of the Sars-poteries studio. This visual memory, family anchored in Sars-Poteries, the home of the free glass demovement she adhered to, is a tribute to those who founded it and made it happen, while its roots, the essence of the movement, remains visible in the fog of our unstable memories. There are other spirits that populate and feed her of her Inlandsis, like the igloo of her Péril en la demeure, a rounded half-sphere composed of intertwined pâte de verre caribou antlers a mythical shape for this artist whose exploration of empty space are central to her work.

For the first time Michele Perozeni has presented a figurative narration, that sometimes silently howls its anger to the ice-breakers. Her Black Glass plates may represent the figurative cut through the Arctic by oil prospectors and the effects of global warming, but this not message : « I do not want to talk about reindeer or Inuits, ‘‘‘my work concers the nothingness, lies deep within everything that is destined to disappear.’’ We thus come back to the concept of passing time and the fleetingness of tempus fugit in Latin. Antlers, which are in fact made of bone, grow and wither each year, in pace with the brutal change of seasons in the Polar Regions. The natural order that governs their growth defies the laws of balance and gravity, Over-heavy and fragile to the core, they only serve to provide during a display of male dominance during the mating season, and are inelegantly considered as male secondary sexual traits or otherwise hung on walls as hunting trophy. When cast in glass, they can fully express their intrinsic beauty and elegance. When intrlocked, they form a compact structure. Grouped together, they become a rippling wave, or a dazzling piece of strokable fur. It is an improbable forest, as she aptly calls one of her pieces.

The equipment needed to join this poetic expedition to Inlandsis is quite basic: eyes with which to contemplate the white gold of this paradoxical universe, a free spirit that will let you lose ourselves in it without apprehension, and a touch of credulity hidden deep in our memories. After many months of drawing, casting, firing, anneling, stripping, and finishing, Michele Perozeni has provided everything we need to make this short journey a memorable one. On Inlandsis , time is fleeting but not in the same way for us all.

Thierry de Beaumont Journalist, author, teacher at the École Camondo, Paris.