At the very beginning, there are colonies of entities shaped by hand within the clay. A fabulous desire to create form, and with it a sense of the infinite embedded within the body of each of the elements. Water, earth, fire and air: each leaves its imprint upon the soul and the material.

Much like a secret garden revealed, this exhibition by ceramicist Névine Bouez invites us on a journey that wends its way to the heart of the creative spirit of the elements. The garden is well and truly a place apart, where flamboyant utopias, intimate embraces, both eternal and fleeting, and cycles and enigmas of rebirth are all preserved and expressed. The garden is a place of wonder that leads us to the contemplation of the most minute things that make up the poetry of the world. The garden restores meaning to time as it explores the very nature of life.

Restoring this meaning to time and to the hand that shapes, questioning the cosmic scale and nature of all that is living, that is the voice of ceramics today. This art form tells the story of the world far more eloquently than any individual. It is a veritable means and medium through which the tangible realities of the material and the elements can be discovered. Bouez is enamoured of a multitude of formal languages and possesses mastery of all the technical aspects of her medium, ceramics, an art of earth and fire: shaping, drying, glazing and firing. The series presented here are influenced by the plant and animal kingdoms, and explore aspects of the complexity of aquatic environments and the influence of the imaginary world of water on this substance. The shapes drawn by the earth beneath the oceans, the formation, life and death of coral reefs, the memory of the sand, the melancholy of running water, the reverie elicited by an aquatic garden, all provide keys that reveal the creative inspiration of the artist.

The attempt to connect with the magnificent secrets of the waters: its currents and depths abounding with its particular fauna, flora and fossils, is about the exploration of both the infinitely vast and the infinitesimal. This endeavour informs a formal language that is expressed in its space through the medium of containers, stele, murals and the installation itself. It gives rise to a questioning about the wonder of the living and invites us to ponder it in all its curious, fabulous and tragic whole. Above all, it encourages us to listen with attention and sensibility to the prophecies borne in water, and sense the fragility of our planet and its ecosystems. This raises our awareness of the need to counter the ecological crisis that is arguably as much a disastrous consequence engendered by an overall lack of sensibility.

In the hope of providing the world with a means to express the often unperceived yet infinitely eloquent spectacle of the remaining beauty on this earth, which we often cannot find the means to express, we sought to enhance the imaged dynamics of words, to bring forth a means of expressing the inexpressible. Consequently, we offer a selection of terms and possible names that are ascribed to things. The intent is to open up and reveal the deeper import of what is expressed in order to encourage us all the more to think, and perchance, to dream.

Press release courtesy Galerie Tanit.