TAMARIS BORRELLY

Vibrancy, draws us into a process of transformation, where some forms are defined, while others appear in the making, in the midst of an evolutionary process. The entanglements between plant and animal forms create a dense weave that echoes the layered richness of the living world. The process of germination, the ripening of seeds, is stylized as a matrix-like soil teeming with microorganisms, cells, embryos, and animals.

In Cocoons, the ground holds oval or round shapes—like eggs or cradles—harboring bodies and creatures in formation. Fine threads, like delicate veins, stretch into long cords, connecting beings in a dormant state that precedes the vital spark of awakening.

A profusion of elements is exchanged between organisms through chains. Pleiades of forms intertwine and intersect. The arrangement of embryonic shapes—filled with cells and heterogeneous components—suggests an intricate organic system.

Elements of the landscape interlace like filigree, like stones set in jewelry. Bodies are interwoven, sewn or knotted together in various ways. They stream, curl, and glide across the paper like a river.

Through this collection of drawings, the artist invites us into the intricate fabric of a planet teeming with organisms and micro-organisms, endlessly evolving in symbiosis. Here, living beings lie within a landscape of matter, humus, and bodies still in formation—an environment that attests to the abundant precision of creation. As Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek^[1]^:–****– ^__“This is the truth of the pervading intricacy of the world’s detail: the creation is not a study, a roughed-in sketch; it is supremely, meticulously created, created abundantly, extravagantly, and in fine.”

Tamaris Borrelly offers us a vision of nature as an extraordinarily complex assembly of macroscopic and microscopic life forms—the underlying pulse of life on Earth. Her drawings, where bodies are shaped by organs and matter, invite us to contemplate the mystery of life. They remind us that we are endlessly interwoven with the animal, plant, and mineral worlds—and that life itself is a vast and intricate tapestry.

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[1]–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (McGraw-Hill College, 1974), Chapter 8, P136.

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Tamaris Borrelly’s work revolves around the living world, its metamorphoses, its fragility and its durability. Landscape and dreaming are at the center of Borrelly’s work. She questions the relationships between species and the biological links through her search for the fusion of matter. Like the scientist seeking to contribute to universal knowledge, she seeks to create a space opening onto another world.

Tamaris Borrelly (b. 1987, Paris) is a French artist who mainly works with drawing, animation, and installation. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, then furthered her study of experimental film and animation at the School of Visual Art in New York. She has worked and lived in India on several occasions to develop her visual work and her relationship with the landscape. The artist currently lives and works in Paris.

Borrelly’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in galleries and art institutions such as DUMONTEIL, Shanghai (2023); CRD Pantin, Pantin, France (2021); Galerie du Haut-Pavé, Paris (2021); Coral studio, Mumbai (2016); ENSBA, Paris (2014), etc. Most recently, her work has joined the collections of the CNAP and the ADRA art libraries in the form of colour engraving produced with the René Tazé intaglio workshop (2025). She collaborated with choreographer Clémentine Vanlerberghe on set designs and videos for Gratia Lacrimarum (2020), expanded into sculpture using terracotta during her residency in Mumbai (2013), and participated in “Silence,” a residency exhibition curated by Penone at Le Corbusier’s Convent of La Tourette (2012).