Ex-voto

Anne-Marie Dehon

A few months ago, I suddenly understood that my craft was a votive practice: a wishfull practice for a world without technology. An ex-voto is an object that we offer to the divinity to thank the god for a gift or to prevent something from happening in the future. In a way, my entire ceramic work is an ex-voto that carry the wish of a world with much less technology. By defining it as an ex-voto I am questioning my practice: to make a wish does not mean that it will happen, neither that it has any impact on the reality. Is that not when the situation is desperate that we refer to a divinity? Is making ceramics a desperate whisper to protect an idealized nature? What is the meaning today to idealize nature while we destroy it by our way of life? This reflects on my own practice of craft regarding to the destruction of nature by technology. The ceramic objects are the votive object, the wish carried by the craft. The picture represents the nature as it is (cf. Trolhättan project) or as we desire it to be (cf. Fragonard project). The project as a whole question the idealization of nature, the idealization of craft and his meaning today in a context of global warming.

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Bio

Anne-Marie was born in Belgium in 1988. After a degree in political science, she studied ceramics with F. Urrejola (Lodève, France), and painting at Royal Academy of Fine Art of Brussels. She worked as an artist between 2012 and 2020 in Brussels before to move in Sweden in 2020. She has recently been graduated at Hdk-Valand (Gothenburg, Sweden) in ceramic art. Her projects has been supported among others by the Konstnärsnämnden and the Estrid Ericsons foundation.

Artist Statement

My work can be viewed as a triangle whose three angles are nature, craft and technology.

I first encountered ceramics in a community farm in the south of France in 2012. I immediately immersed myself in it, with the hope of finding a way to make art while being closer to nature and without any need of technology. Before coming to this community, as strange as it may seem, I was enthusiastically studying computer sciences in a college in Belgium.

These examples coming from my biography show the complex relationship between myself (the craftsperson), nature and technology. This relationship still goes on today. All my projects relate to my desire to rediscover nature – while, at the same time, relying on new digital technologies. Currently, I am exploring this love-hate relationship between nature and technology in my immediate surrounding. I am exploring different places where technological infrastructure meets nature: the internet cables laying in the bottom of the sea, and a hydroelectric plant that stops the stream of a river to create electricity. I document those places.

Through the process of ceramic making, video, sound editing and auto-fictional writing, I am looking for the voice of the craft: what can craft say about our desire for nature vs. our needs for technology?

In the exhibition space, I am exploring the close relationship between ceramics and the documents collected during my journeys. How, together, can they speak about the love and the hate that exist between craft, nature and technology. How ceramics itself can be a document? How can document dialogues with ceramics? What is the voice of nature and technology in the exhibition space?

My practice is site-specific, documentary, fragmented, fictional, auto-fictional, multimedia, political.

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