Artistic approach
Sara Favriau sculpts wood with remarkable energy and inventiveness, working her chosen medium into gossamer-light shapes that play with the space within the Bee Barn along with her amazing “colonnes grignotées” (nibbled columns).
Sara Favriau is interested in the notion of extension, creating bridges between shape and content. She appropriates classical techniques of working and extends them with present-day codes: moulding turns plastic blister packaging into anthropomorphic bas-reliefs, machined wooden battens are sculpted into cabin frameworks, and marquetry on layers of plywood generates a moucharabieh motif.
“It’s this open door that brings the work into existence, freeing it from any description, teetering between form and meaning”. Sara Favriau
The artist recently starting sculpting using wooden battens, drawing inspiration from the realm of construction. She cuts, sculpts and assembles them to create townships composed of huts of various sizes. From mobile to dwelling. She provides her bits of wood with a new functionality, a second life. Sculpted, these common-or-garden battens are both more solid (as they are cut with the grain) and more fragile (as they are thinner).
“I ennoble the role of “framework” through simple procedures and actions. The object becomes hybrid, halfway between structure and ornament, and provides a new phase of interpretation that goes beyond the manufacturing process”. Sara Favriau
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Sara FAVRIAU
FRANCE
Sara Favriau was born in 1983; she lives and works in Paris. She explores old and new ways of working: as in a palimpsest, classical techniques mix with contemporary practices. Her research is an attempt at poetic reflection on the mechanisms of history. She works with materials most often encountered in the world of industry, bypassing their original functions, freeing them from their traditional paths to fulfil a simpler destiny. And from such synthesis, a story is born.
Sara Favriau graduated from the National Higher School of Fine Arts in Paris (Giuseppe Penone’s studio) in 2007, following a residency at Villa Médicis in 2005. 2015 saw her first solo exhibition, “La houle se déroulant au fracas de la coque (…), je sabrais l’écume”, held at the Maubert Gallery. Her second solo exhibition, “La redite en somme, ne s’amuse pas de sa répétition singulière” was held at the Palais de Tokyo from February to May 2016.
