Morgane Tschiember
Born in Brest in 1976, the French sculptor Morgane Tschiember strives to give a new sense of freedom to the materials she works with. Her work has evolved over the course of her collections, with influences ranging from Tuscany to Japan.
“Art is a dialogue,” Morgane Tschiember says. Tschiember likes spontaneous encounters. They inspire her. The unexpected combination of materials in her sculptures and installations—glass and concrete for “Bubbles,” wood for “Honey Honey,” ceramic and rope for “Polystrene, Shibari & Co.,” foam and wax for “Monochrome”—are as much experiments as they are ways of opening up a new world of possibilities. With each artwork, she examines the very essence of the materials, their density, their structure, and defies their physical limitations. For “Dust Devil,” she created bubbles of blown glass mixed with dust, resulting in forms that were almost on the verge of breaking. Contemplating this work—which was part of the Six Soleils exhibition at the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne in 2016—the astrophysicist Daniel Kunth said, “If I had an accurate representation of the moment right before the big bang, it would resemble this piece.”
Morgane Tschiember loves “understanding the rules in order to break free from them.” When visiting glassblowers who told her that what she was asking wasn’t possible, that she was wasting her time, she decided to blow the glass herself. She doesn’t work alone, but she’s the one who welds the iron (in “Folded”), ties the knots, fires the clay (in “Polystrene, Shirabi & Co.), and cuts the marble. “Failure is very important in my work,” she says. “Creating your own tools generates new techniques and therefore a new way of thinking that is not pre-defined.”
At the age of four, Tschiember had already decided that she wanted to become an artist. Her mother gave her copper plates to engrave. To soothe her distress at being unable to print her work on paper, her father found a way to use an old apple press in their garage. It was a light-bulb moment for her. “I was fascinated,” she recounts. “I loved this shift in meaning, this progressive shift of form, of function. Using an object and changing its function.”
She later saw an exhibition on Japan at the Centre Pompidou with her mother and fell in love with the country’s rituals. Her parents gave her a kimono that she wore during meals, and she refused to use any other cutlery besides chopsticks. Years later, a Japanese gallery invited her to participate in an artist residency. Here she discovered kinbaku. Fascinated, she learned the art of bondage created by the samurai. “Now, most of my pieces require rituals,” Tschiember tells me. When a collector acquires one of her pieces, she asks them to take a picture with it in situ. When she creates a marble piece washed in wine, she likes to imagine that its buyer will choose a moment in the year to repeat this act. For her, the object creates a social bond, it allows a dialogue to take place. Travel, dialogue, and encounters matter to her. Tschiember shared her first studio with Olivier Mosset, and she has collaborated with artists such as Douglas Gordon and John M. Armleder. The way she describes it, when you meet a person, you encounter time, an accumulation of time. Once when she missed her plane in Venice, she chatted with a group of women who recommended she meet the owner of a marble quarry. She traveled to Tuscany and discovered the place where Michelangelo found the raw material for his masterpieces.
Monte Altissimo will be the location of her next project, which we can already imagine will pose a challenge to the elements that will be as powerful as it will be unexpected.
“DYSFUNCTIONAL,” GALLERIA GIORGIO FRANCHETTI ALLA, CA’ D’ORO, VENICE, MAY 8 TO NOVEMBER 24.
“TRANS WORLD,” NICODIM GALLERY LOS ANGELES, JUNE 8 TO AUGUST 10.
“TRANS WORLD,” GALLERIA NICODIM, BUCHAREST, JUNE 15 TO AUGUST 17.