Artist-in-residence programmes at La Colombière

2020 residency

Chloé Bocquet - Prints

Chloé Bocquet was born in 1993. Graduating from Le Mans School of Fine Arts in 2017, she discovered printmaking during her studies, and gained experience at the Ateliers Moret (Paris) and graphic arts section of Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts (HPB) in Germany.

During her residency, Chloé Bocquet developed three series of printed images, using techniques including linocuts, monotyping or copperplate engraving. These methods were already part of her repertoire. The Loire landscapes which Chloé Bocquet encountered daily during her residency led her to embrace new working practices. For the dyeing of her paper media, she used plants foraged in the Loire Valley (Chestnut or Walnut leaves or Elderberries). She also developed a colour chart based on plant decoctions. Chloé Bocquet drew inspiration from her interaction with the ever-present Loire and the structures populating its banks.

Diane Hymans - Photographs

Diane Hymans was born in 1991 and lives in Paris. She started out studying History of Art at the Sorbonne before enrolling at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles in 2015, graduating from there in June 2018. She harnesses photography as if it were a magnifying glass, homing in on detail and fragmentation. This is a method which allows her to engage in introspection through a literal monocular lens. She is particularly interested in plants and their portrayals.

During her residency, Diane Hymans was inspired by the image of the ecological and feminist figure of a woman sowing seeds, which she compares with another, equally symbolic image, that of the flower. She immersed herself in the Loire landscapes through readings, walks, encounters and gathering of native plants that grow alongside the river. To conclude her residency, she would produce a “symbolic” garden at La Colombière: an installation of 12 images depicting muscular women, reminiscent of the figure sowing seeds (often negatively perceived since they are deemed androgynous, at odds with female beauty ideals), juxtaposed alongside advertising texts for fertilisers or flower seeds to highlight this expectation to be beautiful - which applies just as much to women as it does to flowers.

2019 residencies

Marie Liberos - Paintings

Painter and visual artist Marie Liberos was born in 1986 in Paris, and now lives in Tours. During her residency, she developed a project expressing the fragile, changing nature of the natural landscapes.

How can we properly get to know a landscape, its history and its relationship with the environment? This question led to the idea for the Lune Noire series. Painting the same view every day, from the same vantage point, in the same format, and taking daily scientific readings of the river water and air temperature, water height, current and wind speeds. This project fitted into the timeframe of the residence, i.e. a full lunar cycle, beginning with the new moon. The aim was to fully experience a single site along the Loire banks that was within close proximity of living elements like water, wind, sunlight, fauna and flora. The easel was set up beneath a white willow, beside the river, located exactly at 28 Rue Foulques Nerra in Préban.

Aurélia Frey - Photographs

On arriving at La Colombière, Aurélia Frey felt fascinated by the presence of Gustave Pimienta which seems to haunt the studio where he lived. The statues still in place watch over the estate. His poems and writings about art reveal who he was, and his thoughts. As well as his need to commune with nature, his love for poetry and art, and his fondness of silence and observation, which sparks the imagination. One can imagine his long, silent wanderings in this Loire Valley, his adopted home, his daydreams accompanying the landscape and his emotions when contemplating works of art, such as the sculpted façade of a manor house, a church pediment or a museum painting. So, in turn, she set off in his footsteps, weaving her own daydreams into his. There is beauty here, contemplation, peace and quiet, as well as the presence of the ghost in whose footsteps she follows.

2018 residencies

Ladislas Combeuil - Sculptures

During his residency, visual artist and sculptor Ladislas Combeuil decided to tap into the space of La Colombière and its terraced garden with panoramic views over the Loire. In this way, his installations and sculptures breathe new life into this elegant garden, interacting with the river, making use of often unusual materials and exhibiting strikingly contemporary forms. This site, which undeniably inspired Gustave Pimienta, thus becomes an artist’s garden once again. Ladislas Combeuil is a graduate from Angers School of Fine Arts. His work alternates between sculpture and painting and combines a range of functional, decorative and mathematical approaches. 

Déborah Aubert - Local stories

Déborah Aubert was born in 1990. A graduate from Versailles National School of Landscape Architecture, her creations make use of cartographic arrangements, perceptible drawings of objects or enhanced mock-ups to examine the shifting nature of landscapes. During her residency, she worked in connection with inhabitants’ stories. Taking the question of their everyday relationship with the Loire as her starting point, Déborah Aubert presented her own take on the personal stories gathered by juxtaposing them alongside different expressions involving paint, text and maps. In this way, she gave form to a “perceptive portrait” of the area which reveals the local community’s ties with their river.

2017 residency

Julie Maquet - Sculptures

Born in 1990, Julie Maquet gained her Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression plastique (Higher National Diploma in Plastic Arts) from the TALM ANGERS Graduate School of Fine Arts in 2015. She works with volume and sculpture.

She has undertaken her work at the La Colombière with the intention of transforming the space made available into a “cabinet of curiosities”, with a contemporary twist, in order to exhibit a series of productions both connected with and offset against the context of the Loire Valley cultural landscape, carried out by permanently salvaging and collecting commonplace and everyday objects. She offered an image of nature, an interpretation of her own. But through the channel that is nature we also questioned our relationship with notions to do with standards, norms and conformity, and so with “monstrosity” - invented notions implemented by the human world.

2016 residency

Alix Gastineau - Music & sound

A percussionist by training, Alix Gastineau graduated from TALM-Angers (formerly ESBA) and has a Master’s degree in visual expression (DNSEP). Today, he explores the social dynamics fostered by concerts. Whether as a performance, installation or musical score, his work takes its cue from the acoustics of a context, of a particular place, and strives to give an imaginary dimension to it - a blind interpretation.

The artistic installation he exhibited at the end of his residency was called In pursuit of the bumblebee. The word for bumblebee in French, “bourdon”, also has musical connotations. Indeed, in English too, this term refers to a sustained note, a continuous chord, from church bells and hurdy-gurdy drone strings to the drone pipes of some bagpipes. The quest implied by the title evokes an acoustic investigation in the region. This quest manifests as a journey, an audio composition broadcast in the exhibition venue. A composition created entirely from field recordings and disseminated in a loop into the surrounding area. Often set deep underground, troglodytic spaces resonate with a subterranean, almost silent, kind of music, that of the body in motion, of humankind interacting with its habitat. Recordings incorporated into the composition evoked this pace of life so characteristic of troglodytic spaces. In connection with the electroacoustic installation, the exhibition displayed a cabinet of curiosities that served as a record of objects found, modified or created during the residency period.

2015 residency

Maryline Tagliabue - Sculpture

A landscape engineering graduate from the Blois National School for Nature and Landscape, Maryline Tagliabue works independently and takes part in a variety of projects spanning the arts and landscape. During her residency, she developed a sensitive landscape approach using tools and methods from the world of art and design: 

• mapping as a means of randomly exploring the area, and then of representing an experience,
• sculpture and volume for working the materials found on-site.

As such, in the form of prints, she fixed and gave shape to all sorts of landscape facets - its uses, past and present traces and its founding elements such as stone, water, gardens and vines (which is the definition of the Loire Valley's cultural landscapes given by Louis-Marie Coyaud).