Karine Bonneval

Karine Bonneval’s cross-disciplinary approach suggests natural alternative ways to breathe, move and listen with the plant world. The artist invokes popular and scientific culture in her pieces, inviting humans to discover “phytomorphism”, to share, for a moment, an experience with the plants, in dialogue with the air, the ground and gravity. Her work led her to build rhizomatic projects which involve people from different worlds, from the arts or scientific backgrounds. In working on these projects, she looks into the interactions that link humans with plants and animals, and the invisible marks our continual exchanges with nature have left behind.

For the artist, soil is not a simple, inert material, it is a world in itself, complex and living, a combination of multiple microscopic species, nutriments and minerals that are in constant interaction with one another. Since conducting her research, she considers plants as functioning living beings, much in the same way as other cultures already do, particularly the populations living in the world’s tropical regions.

With Karine Bonneval, the viewer can discover sounds devoted to millet, yucca or even rice, admire sweet carnivorous plants as you would decorative objects, or study curious black clay shapes that can be used to give insects a voice. The artist will stop at nothing when it is a question of listening to the natural world! That is why each of her projects offers the possibility to gain a better understanding of nature’s inhabitants. From the compost teeming with life in the garden to a neighbouring field struggling to bear the strain of intensive crop farming, via Berlin’s botanical garden or the districts of Colombo in Sri Lanka, the artist chooses highly contrasting environments in which to carry out her research.

Karine Bonneval often provides a bench for her exhibitions to encourage the viewer to take a moment to contemplate their surroundings, to think and listen. “In the Western world, we tend to think we are at the top of the pyramid, dominating the rest of the living world. However, civilisations such as the Achuar indigenous people remind us that we need to understand the whole of the natural world. This stance is essential in considering today’s ecology.”

For her participation in this year’s Art Season at the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire, Karine Bonneval is exhibiting Portées par le vent, larmes de pollen, an installation she created in collaboration with chemist Nicolas Visez. In the Donkey Stables, the artist showcases the beauty of pollen, these microscopic organisms that were designed to pass on life.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Karine Bonneval was born in 1970 in La Rochelle. After graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Angoulême and the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, the artist has exhibited in France, Germany, Latvia, Denmark, the United States, Argentina and Sri Lanka. With scientist Eric Badel (INRAE PIAF) and Studio Décalé, she won the Carasso Foundation grant “Composing knowledge” in 2019. She was also a laureate of the Grantham Foundation residency in Canada for 2023.

In collaboration with teams of scientists in plant ecophysiology and pedology, her projects look for ways to interact differently with the rest of the living world: Institut Diversité, Écologie et Évolution du Vivant and NeuroPsi, University of Paris-Saclay/INRAe PIAF, Clermont Ferrand / LASIRE, University of Lille / LadHyX, CNRS-École Polytechnique/Rillig Lab, Freïe Universität Berlin / Soil and crops science section, Cornell University, USA.

Karine Bonneval has been living in the Centre-Val de Loire region since 2010.