Artist Mathilde Roussel-Giraudy asks you to reflect on the loss of a loved one with her creative sculpture series Empreinte. She cut and stitched a real pillow, and then cast it with plaster to make a mold for the ceramic piece. She also used a wool sweater and covered it with resin to make it look stiff and hollow inside. From sketch to final execution, these pieces took her a month to complete. “When absent, the body of someone becomes the negative space of the objects left behind, the artist says. “Tracing and mapping absence, shadowing the contours of a vanished presence, Empreinte reveals the imprinted sensations of a missing being.”
I enjoyed the artist's statement: “My artwork combines drawing, printmaking, sculpture, book art, and photography to explore the interconnected value of identity and memory. My multi-media approach to art reflects the unique way I experienced the world growing up in an old farmhouse in the French countryside. The values of preservation, attachment to roots and relationship with land and time, emphasized in my childhood, continues to inspire my work. By exploring and juxtaposing subtle links between anatomy, psychology, ecology and cosmology, I try to understand the mysteries of our inner and outer selves. Likewise, in seeking to reveal the world's invisible energies, knots and folds, fragments and marks, I strive to raise awareness of the key role that nature plays in our lives.” Mathilde Roussel-Giraudy is also the one behind the growing grass sculpture we wrote about here. Mathilde Roussel-Giraudy
