MANON SARAH THIRRIOT

We could approach Manon Sarah Thirriot's process in the same way as anthropologist Françoise Héritier defined her own thinking, as “always and again, in motion”. The landscapes she composes, at the confluence of sculpture, photography and installation, all stem from this same movement, this wandering that projects beyond oneself and plunges inwards at the same time. From her travels, discoveries, encounters and experiences, their inevitable transformation into memories - in other words, their digestion - Manon Sarah Thirriot extracts fragments, recomposes them and confronts them with thought, art history, natural science and craft skills. Despite their highly ornamental quality, the resulting forms are more complex than they appear - they are in fact complete, crystallizing at the very heart of the material many interwoven memories, symbols and the work of many hands in a constant technical hybridization. This crossover between contemporary art and craft practices took a new turn for her when she discovered marquetry in Rome, during her Wicar residency, and is now experimenting with its many plastic possibilities (1).

Her travels took Manon Sarah Thirriot to New Zealand in early 2023 to discover the art of the Maoris, their richly varied craftsmanship and, in particular, their basketry skills. The baskets (kete) of flax (harakeke) and other plant-fibre panels (tukutuku), with all their cultural and ritual depth - a production with an intense relationship to care and harmony. At the same time, she reflects on the notion of landscape - a consciously cultural relationship with nature - and questions its conditions of perception and models of representation, notably through Philippe Descola's lectures at the Collège de France.

“Whether it involves the sense of smell, hearing, sight or touch, landscape becomes a web of experienced stimuli and recalled memories, sometimes almost autonomous in their power, sometimes inextricably intertwined in the evocation of a place.” (2)

Maori craftsmanship and her reading of Descola soon led her to “a more holistic and sacred reading of landscape” (3), with wood becoming a “material to think about, where [she could] inscribe, in the hollows of the veins, an intimate and sensitive landscape thought”. The forms she fixes there - gestures and testimonies, anodyne archives, natural elements and isolated testimonies - are so many fragments of memory, blurred no doubt, evanescent, yet composing a deeper landscape that, in many ways, harks back to Camille Corot's painting - that painting of “remembrance” (4) that moves landscape from narrative to memory.

In the “ressouvenir” invoked by Manon Sarah Thirriot, the intimacy of our relationship with nature is revealed, the learning of our absolute interdependence. If it doesn't assert itself clearly in the work - like our memories, partial and fickle - it does not fail to remind us of it more explicitly in our daily lives. What remains is a feeling of the need for care and reconnection, for “if the heart of the flax is torn out, where will the meliphage sing?” (5). - Grégoire Prangé, author and curator

(1) Notably in his collaborative work with Etienne Hubert, an artist and marker living in Lille.

(2) Descola P., “Cours : les formes de paysage I”, Anthropologie de la nature, Collège de France, 2001.

(3) Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are taken from notes sent by the artist in September 2024.

(4) Pomarède V., Wallens (de) G., Corot. La mémoire du paysage, Gallimard, Paris, 1996, p.102.

(5) Phrase taken from a traditional Maori chant sung by women while weaving or basket-making, inscribed on one of the works in the exhibition - de la nature, serons-nous les méliphages ?

Image above: Géométrie #1, 2022. Walnut sphere: 40 cm Ø

Image below: Rotorua, 2024. Wood inlay. 120 x 90 cm (Photo: eiio.studio)