Sculpting Sustain

Victoire Barbot (b. 1988) graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris and lives in Marseille. She works with discarded materials drawn from industry, ones that carry the trace of time, disuse and bankruptcy.

Her sculpture builds precarious balances, held by weight and adjustment rather than glue or weld, as a way of putting things back into use and giving them meaning again. Since 2014 she has followed a protocol she calls Misensembles, in which one set of elements is arranged, taken apart and arranged anew.

For Sculpting Sustain, she kept the factory basket more legible than anyone else: the materials stand on found supports, each still itself, held in the moment just before the recycling line would have ground them into a uniform mass.

Nora Guislain (b. 1996) lives and works in Paris. She trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Villa Arson, after first studying theatre theory. Her work treats identity as a role that is played rather than fixed, and questions how images construct it. For Sculpting Sustain, she folded and cut recycled PVC into infant silhouettes. In a plain industrial sheet, the presence of a body appears.

Matthieu Hemmer (graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris) has a transdisciplinary practice between art, architecture and design, attentive to how forms adapt to a changing environment. For Sculpting Sustain, he made five transparent recycled PVC tubes, suspended and lit from within, each holding cut yellow stars and pale blue strips. The colours of the European flag drift inside the columns, and the title leaves them hanging between a forecast and a warning.

Jei Ryung Lee (b. 1986) is a South Korean artist based in Berlin. Her practice centres on writing, which she treats as both a tool and a physical material. She breaks language down and reassembles it across installations, sculptures and drawings, drawing on the way writing both represses and frees what we think. She has shown her work in New York, Seoul and Berlin. For Sculpting Sustain, she printed recycled PVC strips with a series of moral precepts and knotted them into a suspended ring, returning an industrial film, normally used to label or wrap, to the act of carrying language.

Raphaël Rossi (b. 1988) works between installation, painting and collage. His formal language comes from cinema facades and the systems used to display images. For Sculpting Sustain, he treated PVC waste as a painting support: six tall panels in white, black and red, leaned against the wall, carrying flat colour and small inset film stills. Kept against the wall rather than hung, the images seem to wait rather than to be shown.

Manuel Vieillot (b. 1990) graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris and develops a long-running project he calls Home Theatre System, on the different ways an image can exist, between painting, sculpture and the screen. His work has notably been shown at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. For Sculpting Sustain, he stacked PVC coloured sheets and bent them into a single wave, held under tension by a strap. Titled Portfolio, the piece holds its colours the way a book holds its pages, open and clamped shut at once.