Visual Vertigo: Gaëlle Foray's Homage to the Discarded
Amber Ball
Gaëlle Foray’s artistic style invites renewed meditation upon the two human processes that surround the artwork: first, the phenomenology of perceiving art, and second, the metamorphosis of raw materials into aesthetic object at the hands of the artist. On the side of reception (in other words, the viewer’s experience of Foray’s works), they demand first to be felt. Only following an immediate visceral “strike” of abstract, unfocused perception, does the analytical eye proceed to examine these intricate works up-close, parsing their immense and meticulous detail. On the side of artistic creation, Gaëlle’s methods elicit questions about the artist’s relationship to the earth’s finite materials, to the tension between environmental awareness and our own extractive practices. Foray’s response to issues of waste and consumption at the heart of artistic endeavours is that she exclusively uses discarded materials; a form of recycling, gleaning, and/or foraging in the lived world. She thoughtfully transforms and in transforming, “pays homage to” natural matter like animal bones, minerals, and fossils, as well as repurposing synthetic rubbish such as long-discarded plastic toys and their adult equivalent: tupperware, abandoned family photo albums, and démodé dinner party utensils from the eighties.
What emerges from the selection of Foray's works featured in this issue is equally a clash between the ephemerality of the human lifespan and planetary spatio-temporal dimensions. Her artistic process forces vertiginous acknowledgement of the fragility of human existence as it presses up against that which the human tries to capture through art: the world. And what’s more, the earth’s monumental landscapes only ever figure as and in fragments. Two specific conflicts return across Foray’s works to create this sense of vertigo. First is the contrast between the limited human lifespan and the eternity of the fossil; the latter being an object that is at once microscopic yet produced and existing on an unfathomably large geological temporal scale. A secondary contrast arises from Foray’s recurrent human-natural juxtaposition as the boundedness of human life continually knocks up against raw and unruly natural matter. Foray’s recourse to diverse textures and materials heightens these oppositions - schist lies atop bone, the smooth veneer of a photograph envelops a human form but rests against the jagged edges of a stone. As we shall explore through ruminations upon specific pieces, her method prompts inquiry into the relationship between these human and geological timescales, attesting Foray’s remarkable ability to capture brevity and limitlessness in tandem. Of equal note is Foray’s repeated, self-reflexive wink to art’s mediation of the world through a “framing effect” as she regularly makes the protective screen or staging of an exhibition space integral to the artwork itself.
When featuring both photos and fossils, Gaëlle’s pieces operate as self-contained ecosystems, akin to stumbling upon a diorama that has escaped from its box, or a snowglobe whose glass sphere has been shattered and from which the liquid has drained away. In La Mer the shattered snowglobe’s sparkly snowflakes seem to have settled upon the scene depicted. Gaëlle playfully warps representation of an underwater scene beginning with the background which consists of a duo of kitsch, two-dimensional fresques of dolphins frolicking in the ocean (likely holiday souvenirs). Against this backdrop (that is itself contained within a white polystyrene box, used for transporting fish in ice), in our first plane of vision, we observe the real scène marinière which possesses far greater depth in spite of its minimalism. There, two jumping dolphins (resin figurines) are welded to the “waves” made of the same material and sit amid real coral as well as rubble and polished stones. A fossil follows them, with the same arched form as the backs of the resin dolphins, while also appearing as their abstraction, shadow, or distortion. At first glance, this third figure resembles a sleepy manatee, lagging behind its energetic cousins. Foray’s reordering of the marine scene interrupts fluid interpretation and underscores the easy slippage between abstract and literal modes of representation.
Yet, it is my experience of the material and subjects of On l'a bien mérité (“We certainly deserved this”) that best epitomizes the “first viewed and second picked apart” effect of Foray’s works. My initial gaze proudly bestowed the title of Terracotta Street upon this work. Varying shades of warm terracotta orange rest against each other and transport me to the side-streets of Perpignan, Lisbon, Seville, or indeed any other Mediterranean town. These warm hued ceramics surround a photograph of an elderly couple. The pair stand proudly amid these tiles, the man’s arm slung over the woman. The discoloured tiles placed side by side form an alleyway along which the couple seem to have paused to pose for a snapshot before continuing along their way. The pair exude an air of smug satisfaction, likely what the titular “deserving” makes reference to. Yet, when I adjust my gaze and “scale out”, I focus, and in doing so, these details palpably shift. The terracotta tiles are in fact tiny fragments, propped up against neither sandstone nor doublting stone, but against the scapula of a cow. This large animal bone towers over my idyll, and as I apprehend this, my idealized vision gives way to a new perspective tinged with decay. In the same moment, the earnestness of the title; of the couple “deserving” their lives becomes an ironic commentary on the very human conceit of thinking we “merit” our existence. Does this old couple instead stand in front of the ruins of their lives? Literally speaking, yes, as Gaëlle informs me that these “tiles” are in fact rubble from a recently demolished house. With my regard touristique I deformed ruins into a picturesque scene, I glossed over and beautified decay and in doing so, I participate in and perpetuate the “aesthetics of the ruin”. Over the course of our conversations, Gaëlle described such societal reverence for the ruin (both for ancient archaeological sites and for “les déchets de nos petites vies”) as a form of vanity. Her ability to incite this experiential arc from quaint admiration to unsettling analysis exposes my own eye’s participation in this collective vanity as I filter and “fix” damage and decay.
Just as the concept of ruins can at once denote the Acropolis and an abandoned family homestead, elsewhere, the intermingling of different matter and more importantly their differing scales- from miniscule to epochal- leads to a similar warping of the viewer’s perspective. One of Gaëlle’s enduring artistic projects is the Fossile series. These are mosaics of glittering shards of schist and mica schist (collected by Gaëlle herself) set over the bones of livestock animals. These bones’ encrusting with rock feels like a wink to the processes of decomposition and fossilization that await them. Bones are covered with that which they will one day become, mixing different dimensions and timescales of decay. It is not apparent to the layman which parts of a bovine or ovine creature these bones belong to. One could discover this, but it does not seem to be of particular necessity for these fragment’s transformation and preservation. For this reason, Fossile begins to gesture towards the continuous interplay between specificity and anonymity at the heart of Gaëlle’s artistic practice that begins with objects collected in a specific locality (the plateau d’Hauteville where she resides). Bones, fossils, photographs are thence either totally anonymized, “depersonified”, or as we shall later observe, are first uprooted and then re-rooted somewhere totally different.
Animal bones are equally only one facet of the looming spectre of mortality that pervades Gaëlle’s pieces. In Fossile, death is not related to a meditation on the brevity of human existence as in other works. Instead, the series probes the ethics of killing animals to enable our own survival. Gaëlle explains to me that these glittering fossils are the means through which she contends with the violence underpinning the consumption of meat; by looking brutality in the face and offering a reciprocal offering for her consumption. This “homage” is inspired by Jocelyne Porcher’s concept of la bonne vie que l’on doit à ces animaux (“the good life that we owe these animals”). Foray resists framing this artistic practice as a “solution” but rather argues that grappling honestly with such realities is better than not asking the question of how we contend with this ethical quandary.
On their own, Fossile(s) also foregrounds the contrast between the human and the fossil. Despite the fossil’s microscopic size, their formation over millenia makes the human lifespan seem rather inconsequential and our earth feel incomprehensibly large. However, in Le Collier, a string of colourful tupperwares in a geometrical configuration tower over these bones, again reversing this relationship. This arrangement comes from Foray’s 2022 exhibition at le Centre d’art contemporain de Lacoux (as a part of her show Élevé.es sous la mer). In this space, while animal matter’s decomposition and fossilization dwarfs the human lifespan, the towering arrangement of tupperwares into a necklace measuring three metres high (set against a “marsh” coloured square on a wall of five meters by eight metres) re-diminishes the grandeur of these bones. Gaëlle compares her carefully lit, brightly coloured plastic necklace to a petrified butterfly displayed behind glass in a botanical museum and even a stolen colonial object. The motivation behind Le Collier and its staging is precisely to offer a commentary upon the primordial place of plastic in our lives in an era that she jokingly terms the Plasticocene. This plastic “trash”, strung together along an iron wire emblematizes our era of pseudo-sustainability. Tupperwares are at once “sensible”, reusable purchases and are designed to be eye-catching when new. Yet once stained, they rapidly lose their initial appeal and are thence discarded. The teal blue box that shines in the supermarket is never the same once marked with the juices of spaghetti bolognese, attesting the ironic disposability of these “reusable” objects.
Foray’s choice to construct this plastic necklace out of Tupperware containers is also an intentional critique of the “Tupperware” movement itself, which she views as exemplary of a paradoxically patriarchal form of capitalist feminism. Earl Tupper’s 1950s invention was widely regarded as emancipatory not only because it better facilitated domestic food storage (and therefore entailed less cooking), but also because they were most often sold in “Tupperware parties” held by and for suburban middle-class women such that new economic possibilities opened up within prevailing gender roles.
Considered together, Fossile and Le Collier not only form part of a perspectival game, but the visual interplay of quotidian synthetic and natural matter also relativizes notions of scale and temporality. Indeed, the pieces are unified by plastic and fossils’ longevity as well as by Foray’s beautification of vestiges, the rubbish of life. Her multifaceted confrontation with modern consumption patterns invites the viewer to reflect upon their own connections to these cycles of death and decay.
At the centre of another piece, Ankhor, is an elephant, as black and shiny as ivory is iridescent white, standing atop a yellow plastic dish tub as if on a temple plinth. This shimmering elephant is an expertly constructed miniature that Foray fashioned from waste that she gathered from slag heaps in the fields of Lorraine. Having salvaged this black glass -the debris of now defunct steel mills- she cracks it into shards, and then meticulously arranges its pieces into a glimmering mosaic. Again, the repurposing of recycled industrial waste functions as an indictment of global capital flows, of commodity production, overconsumption, and excess that overwhelm local ecosystems. Additionally, for its exotic title, the sculpture nods to the exploitation and voyeurism that undergirds international tourism. Yet the elephant also radiates dignity, a testament to taking the unwanted and elevating it into high art. The creature becomes a modern idol, its construction inciting a feeling of reverence towards the forgotten and discarded, the ruins that industrialization leaves in its wake.
Foray’s work then takes on a satirical tenor when she broaches modern consumerism’s role in an era of accelerating climate crises. Logo fin du monde’s title makes sardonic reference to corporate responses to global warming in which branding and marketing ploys are extended to the climate crisis itself. Here, the title suggests that some enterprise will eventually patent and design a logo for the end of the world. This is again conveyed through the power of the single object, as a plastic fir tree stands alone in a vibrant orange Tupperware bowl. This is the first image that a visitor to Gaëlle’s website would encounter. Once again, the natural and synthetic merge as this lonesome plastic pine which normally adorns a seasonal yule log (and therefore connotes merriment) conjures up a superlative sense of solitude. This solitary tree is without even its usual arboreal companions, an image of desolation that echoes the piece’s title while also reintroducing what appears as the natural marriage of individuality and anonymity in Foray’s work.
Indeed, it is not only the nonhuman or the object that is simultaneously individual, specific, and anonymous, Gaëlle extends this treatment to her human subjects. Her method of collecting photos is identical to her manner of collecting fossils, bones, and minerals. She gathers film prints and digital photographs wherever she might find them; in bins when families or individuals have moved out and onwards, friends also send her collections of photographs that they have chanced upon or obtained in a similar manner. As aforementioned, making art from new things would be counterintuitive to her broader political convictions. Yet what is equally if not more striking is a supplementary product of this creative method: Foray’s mode of ramassage (collection) treats relics of self-representation as equally impersonal and anonymous, a healthy riposte to human exceptionalist tendencies.
Much like the disembodied bones of animals or the deterritorialized pine tree, Foray’s human subjects are unknown, bestowing a unifying force upon her varied artistic practices. This is most apparent in her series of “bejewelled” photographs which desacralize and anonymize domestic life and quaint individual memories by placing calcite crystals on the faces of individuals in photos, whether a newly married couple (Le buffet de la mariée), or a newborn baby (Dans le bain). An uncanny effect of this embellishment is that distinctive facial features are effaced, once again enacting an anonymization rather than personification. This opens upon the main insight into the domain of aesthetics that Foray’s oeuvre offers up to the viewer: that you can apporter le beau in a manner that is highly irreverent.
Anonymity and irreverence equally permeate our encounter with the two unidentified women relaxing happily on a sun-drenched park bench in Sous Cloche 2. Their faces are not “jewelled out” but are nevertheless indistinct. The two women appear to be on holiday in a location made precisely for holidays, making this photograph not the memory of an adventure, but the memory of a simulated adventure. This relates to the meaning of the phrase vivre sous cloche, an idiomatic expression which literally means “to live under a bell”, in other words, to live with so much protection that you no longer experience anything.
In the same manner that the bell-jar metaphor conveys the banality of an insulated human existence in which one rarely brushes against the authentic or unexpected, Foray’s Sous cloche series is also inspired by the old French tradition of “bridal globes”. This practice involved brides placing souvenirs of their wedding day under a glass cloche (their dried bouquet, a tiara) to which they would add other domestic mementos in subsequent years (a lock of their child’s hair for example). This past month, the Sous Cloche series was exhibited at the Musée des Arts et Traditions populaires Marius Audin in Beaujeau where Foray’s cloches sat alongside the real historical relics that inspired them. The photograph inside Foray’s second “cloche” (that is in reality an upside-down Tupperware normally used to store sugar) is untampered with. Distortion nevertheless remains the name of the game as it sits behind a pile of ceramic shells, piled like shoreline rocks at the beach. These “shells” are in fact little snail shell-shaped containers, designed for baking and serving escargots en persillade at dinner parties in the seventies and eighties. The cloche and the natural-unnatural barrier of ceramic seashells exaggerate the distance between the viewer’s life and these womens’ own, as well as giving the photo the status of a relic, as if found buried amid the fossilized objects Foray uses elsewhere.
Sous Cloche’s focus on these two women, much like the anonymous couple on the “terracotta street” from earlier offer the surprising insight that something can be anonymous while retaining a clear sense of history and individuality. What is the broader effect of this insight? Possibly to reflect back at the viewer the use of their own imaginative capacities and practices when viewing art. Or perhaps it forces reflection upon Gaëlle’s artistic process through which objects and/or people are transformed into and become something that they never were originally. What if the “terracotta couple” were not posing in a sleepy Spanish town but in a bustling city like Paris? What if they were surrounded by snow at Christmas in the original photograph? This is the beauty of the collage-like quality of Gaëlle’s art: it sets forth swirling signifiers that the viewer must observe and construct meaning from, but without the pressure of fidelity to any illusory “original” or “real” meaning (either with respect to Gaëlle’s artistic intention or to “real life”). Indeed, in a ludic gesture, atop Sous Cloche 2 sits a resin giraffe, breaking the proverbial “fourth wall” and winking to this capsule’s artificiality. Gaëlle adds that the giraffe's head above all symbolises the carefully ignored consequences of this holidaying lifestyle, of global tourism, on the planet.
Finally, it is again shells that thwart a normal sense of scale when we look to Chambre Terrazo. This piece is an open fresque of a bedroom scene of a size impossible to guess from the photograph in this issue (in real life it measures 20cm by 20cm). A photograph of a bed rests against “terrazzo” wallpaper and carpet - itself a composite of marble, granite, glass chips set in cement. In front of the bed sits a plump, shiny seashell that to me resembles a snoozing, spotted sea lion. The patchwork of material remnants that make up the substance terrazzo thus mirrors Foray's own technique of collaging assorted media into a singular image. As “terrazzo” becomes bedroom wallpaper and shell becomes furniture (or animal), interior and exterior meld together and the domestic sphere appears at once as familiar and wholly alien.
From the terrazzo’s resemblance to eighties wallpaper and Sous Cloche’s use of outdated dinner party snail shells, it is perhaps apparent that the enduring “backdrop” to Foray’s works is the domestic sphere of the late twentieth century. This is the case despite many of the issues that her works interrogate- waste, consumerism, global warming- remaining acutely pressing. Foray explains this as a result of her artistic practice being an exorcising ritual of her own childhood. The static scenes and objects she constructs from Tupperware, photos and fossils capture the ennui and melancholy of a comfortable yet confined life, reminding me of Simone de Beauvoir’s first memoir Memoirs d’une jeune fille rangée.