The work ‘Pantone Alsace (Reading the Landscape)’ is emerging from a meticulously scanned environment. It takes the form of a Pantone colour chart to present a local chromatic range. After several walks to collect plants and fungi in the Alsace region, pigments were extracted to dye the wool which was then woven to obtain a work that bears witness to the “colourful” richness of the regional landscape, offering us a new way of looking at the world. The work was purchased by the Flemish Government in 2023 and is included in the collection of the Flemish Community.
“We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds – and new directions – may emerge.”
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World
Pantone Alsace (Reading the Landscape) – installation shot @ la Kunsthalle Mulhouse
Textile work, manually dyed fibers and manually woven work, 375cm x 300cm (photo JJ.Delattre)
The story Maes writes is that of a living world in constant transformation. This is the principle she employs in the elaboration of her own works, some of which are entirely based on phenomena related to evolutive processes. They ferment, grow, reproduce, decompose, and it is not unusual to come across bacterial and microbial cultures in aquariums within her exhibitions. In a way, non-human living organisms are her valued partners, with whom she engages in multiple and renewed collaborations. But also ‘regular humans’ became creative partners at one or another phase of the artworks, such as the plant pickers and collectors and the scientists from the Université de Strasbourg.
Hunting and collecting in the Vosges, Alsace …
Site-specific colours combine colour and location, as a type of topographical perception through local colour. What colour producing plants and minerals can be found in this place, and how can they be perceived and understood through colour? Plant knowledge is knowledge of place. The project explores topics of plant blindness, urban ecology, mapping, bio-invasiveness, and migration.
This project has resulted in site-specific colour charts -Pantone Alsace- that record, map, and characterise a place; including the fact that, depending on the soil conditions – this also includes pollution and man-made soil compositions – different colours and tones are produced. The same applies to the water composition, acidity, and mineral content. During production, processes such as fermentation, oxidation and modification by iron or copper oxide, and shifting the pH value bring out colours, and intensify and stabilise them.
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Het werk Pantona Alsace in in 2023 aangekocht door de Vlaamse Overheid en is opgenomen in de collectie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap.
Pantone Alsace (2023) zijn drie handgeweven staalkaarten met kleuren uit de Elzasstreek. De kunstenaar organiseerde groepswandelingen om planten en korstmossen te verzamelen, waaruit ze vervolgens pigmenten extraheerde om de schapenwol mee te verven. In tegenstelling tot het klassieke Pantonesysteem van kleurcoderingen zijn Maes’ staalkaarten steeds onderhevig aan een subtiele transformatie. Microbiologen van de Universiteit van Straatsburg werkten mee aan het project.
Anne Marie Maes (°1955) werkt onder meer met installaties, fotografie en performances, maar ook met levende organismen. Haar artistieke praktijk bevindt zich op de snijlijn tussen kunst en wetenschap en heeft een procesmatig karakter. Ze richt zich in het bijzonder op complexe thema’s als biotechnologie, ecosystemen en alchemie. Maes’ oeuvre biedt zo alternatieven voor de anthropocentrische blik op de wereld.
Anne Marie Maes had solotentoonstellingen in onder meer Institute of Evolutionary Biology, Barcelona (ES, 2015), Hamburg Art in Public Space (DE, 2019), Ikob, Eupen (2020), iMAL, Brussel (2021), Pilar, Brussel (2021), Palais de Tokyo, Parijs (2022) en La Kunsthalle, Mulhouse (FR, 2023). In het kader van groepsexpo’s was haar werk te zien in BOZAR Brussel (2014, 2017), de Domeinen Sittard (NL, 2017), Miró Foundation Barcelona (ES, 2018), MAAT Lissabon (2018), HEK, Basel (CH, 2019), Latvian National Museum Riga (2019), Le Pavilion, Namur (2022) en Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Parijs (2023).