arguerite oirel

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Let others use clay, bronze, marble; let them do the equestrian statues, familiar faces, celebrated heads, monuments to the dead… It is down to chance what will be found in the tips and scrap yards amid the shapeless piles of debris that our technological society deposits behind itself, destined to be crushed into jagged cubes or melded together in an industrial mould, destined to become metal once more, daily items again. It is here that Marguerite Noirel finds the materials for her inspiration. It is here, where things end, that something is to begin.
It is later, in the workshop, in the operating theatre, that thought passes into the instruments in the flame of a blowtorch to the highest and purest flame of idea and where metamorphosis is triggered. Manufacturers of agricultural machinery, household utensils, garden tools and arms, along with the metal workers of Flins, Le Mans and Billancourt, cannot have known that they too were working for Marguerite Noirel.

Her hands bring forth hybrids, half-rake, half-machine gun; half salad-shaker, half-camera; half-crab, half-dream; half-billy goat, half-nanny goat; slightly mantis, slightly unpreying. Vacuum cleaners have eyes, funnels have ears, chip pans are caught in an embrace. Complexes twist around themselves; our sins observe us with familiarity.

Even if we should amuse ourselves discovering the original use of that which was something else and which has now become a work of art, of what was once useful and has become mysterious, Marguerite Noirel’s creatures, the fruit of monstrous collisions, fanciful couplings, unnatural unions whose improbability imposes itself, live their own personal lives. They are not marriages of reason, but they cannot be dissolved.

Marguerite Noirel’s know-how is the opposite of laissez faire. This inspired recycling is pure creation.

Translation : Kevin Harrigan