Tiphaine Calmettes, Primordial Soup

Exhibition from 20 May to 23 July 2022
Opening: Thursday 19 May, 4pm onwards

Curator: Émilie Renard

Tiphaine Calmettes cre­ates a new series of sculp­tures that allow you to sit down to taste a drop of kom­bucha, drink a flower tea kept warm in a gar­goyle’s stomach, help your­self to broth from a hollow amidst bread crusts, smell the warm redo­lence of all this cuisine, follow trickles of water as they dribble out of a mon­ster’s mouth, observe ochre light fil­tered through a dried kom­bucha starter, feel the earthy cav­i­ties of the sur­faces around….

View of the col­lec­tive work of La terre embrasse le sol by Tiphaine Calmettes,
ENS Lyon, 2019, raw earth.
Photo: Tiphaine Calmettes.

These sculp­tures are assem­blages of pre­vious expe­ri­ences, works or rejects that have not com­pleted their meta­mor­phosis: under their own inertia and due to wear and tear, some mate­rials give way under their own weight, or seep, crack or evap­o­rate as they are sen­si­tive to heat. All of them are doomed to be fur­ther trans­formed after the exhi­bi­tion. Whether shaped by skilful hands or left in their ini­tial state, they undergo invol­un­tary trans­for­ma­tions on their own. These ver­sa­tile shapes have not only ingested the var­ious strata of the artist’s work, they have also expe­ri­enced motifs from dis­tant periods–anthro­po­mor­phic uten­sils, stony plants, ani­mals with pouring lips... –an entire mon­strous bes­tiary drawn from a sort of imag­i­nary nat­ural his­tory.

Sculpture in pro­duc­tion for the exhi­bi­tion Primordial Soup by Tiphaine Calmettes, Les 8 Pillards, Marseille, 2022
Photo : Tiphaine Calmettes.

“ Primordial soup ” is a term asso­ci­ated with a sci­en­tific theory that says that life on Earth is the result of spon­ta­neous gen­er­a­tion within a milieu warm and sticky enough to allow life to arise. A whole ecosystem sus­tains itself in this pri­mor­dial soup. These sen­sory sculp­tures that seem to have emerged from a troglodyte kitchen, turn Bétonsalon into an inhab­it­able place. Thanks to them, Bétonsalon set­tles into a sort of tel­luric domes­ticity.

An exhi­bi­tion copro­duced by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions for the 2020 prize.

Kombucha mother in the studio of Tiphaine Calmettes during her res­i­dency at the Centre d’art con­tem­po­rain d’Ivry - le Crédac, 2021.
© Adagp, Paris, 2022. Studio Kiösk.

Biography

Tiphaine Calmettes works towards inhab­iting and height­ening the fic­tions that shape our rela­tion­ship to a ter­ri­tory. Using sculp­ture, instal­la­tion and per­for­mance, she seeks to create move­ment in her shapes as well as her research. This is a way of envis­aging the pro­duc­tion pro­cess like a living organism, directly related to the spaces that wel­come her pro­duc­tions, the people they encounter and vice-versa. She pri­marily focuses on devel­oping a life­form and organicity in her works. She then went on to encom­pass the idea of ani­mating arte­facts, both in their rela­tion­ship to usage as well as to their envi­ron­ment or, in other words, she devel­oped an interest in the way the pro­duc­tion of objects and archi­tec­tures are driven both by living species, or the energies that inhabit them, as well as by the phys­ical or psy­chic inter­ac­tions they develop with their sur­round­ings.
Her cre­ative pro­cess is a con­ver­sa­tion with the his­tory of skills and their reac­ti­va­tion in the pre­sent con­text. Thus, atten­tive to the con­text in which her work is pro­duced, Tiphaine Calmettes col­lab­o­rates with var­ious crafts­people (rock artists, alchemists…). Informal, reversible, ephemeral tech­niques serve to ani­mate the life­form through per­for­ma­tive actions. Her objects and nar­ra­tives take the form of “ed­ible sto­ries” brought to life by revis­iting sharing and com­men­sality through flavours and encoun­ters.
Tiphaine Calmettes (born in 1988) lives and works in Aix-en-Provence. She won the AWARE Prize in 2020. Her works have been exhib­ited notably at La Panacée MOCO (Montpellier), the Zoo gallery (Nantes), the Kunstwerk Carlshütte (Büdelsdorf, Germany), the École nor­male supérieure in Lyon, with the Biennale de Lyon 2019. In 2020-2021, she exhib­ited at the La Borne Contemporary Ceramics Centre (Henrichemont), the International Art and Landscape Centre–Île de Vassivière (Beaumont-du-Lac); she was also awarded a res­i­dency at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and at the Centre d’art con­tem­po­rain d’Ivry - le Crédac. In 2022 Tiphaine Calmettes par­tic­i­pated in the group exhi­bi­tion Pionnières at the Zoo gallery in Nantes.

View of Tiphaine Calmettes’s exhi­bi­tion Par le chant gron­dant des vibra­tions autour, Centre inter­na­tional d’art et du paysage, Île de Vassivière, 2021.
© Adagp, Paris, 2022. Photo: Tiphaine Calmettes.