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2025 Art season
Stables Gallery

Carole Solvay

"Sentinelles" and "Sporées"

published at 25/02/2025

Traditional weaving techniques were the first driving force behind Carole Solvay's work. After a long search to find her medium, bird feathers - a complex, organic, living material - became an obvious choice, as the artist would have loved to be an ornithologist. Today, they form her aesthetic personality, in a body of work intrinsically linked to her inner growth and need for silence and solitude - the solitude of the creative act, whose purpose is to exorcise the ephemeral because it is fleeting.

Fascinated by the lightness of being, a quality inherent in feathers, and inspired by her passion for nature and birds, Carole meticulously selects the fragments of feather to use in her work: pinnae, rachis, calamus, barbules. She assembles them using fibres, fine wire, paper, fabric and small pieces of tarpaulin. Her work is conceived as a daily meditation, with her work of the hand taking precedence in a meticulous process, where the notion of time is as important as that of lightness.

Carole Solvay has also explored calligraphy and three-dimensional drawing. A variety of techniques therefore combine with this experimentation with different media to shape quivering, delicate and poetic works, floating installations and sculpture-drawings that link real space and the drawing's fictional space, whose territory she redefines in a certain way. Metal wire is often used, sometimes becoming a linear, outlined installation.

The notion of temporality and the relationship between time and space are notions that the artist cares about deeply. Time shapes our reality as much as our direct environment and personal history. At the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire, Carole Solvay is presenting two works, both created from beautiful peacock feathers for the Château's sumptuous stables, built in 1877 and considered at the time to be the finest in Europe.

The first work, Sentinelles, features three suspended silhouettes, an enigmatic installation on display in a small dark room. Carole Solvay has covered a flexible structure of rods with a meticulous assembly of peacock feather barbules. Light, green and bluish, they catch the soft light, creating beautiful iridescence. Playing with the memory of the Château, the memory of the world and the memory of the artist, with these walls that remember, covered in writing invisible to the eye, Carole wanted something positive to awaken and reveal the energy of the place: an encounter, a sense of belonging, a symbiosis with the spirit of the place.
Like shadows, these sentinels watch silently, unknown but ever-present, benevolent guard dogs and witnesses to countless cycles of life. The stables and Château are inhabited by protective forces. They are not spectres of oblivion, particles of time, but rather absolute protection, unfailing companionship, an invisible arm around our fragile shoulders. As if there were a fellowship between the visitors and the Château’s soul, between the wandering souls and us.
The second work, Sporée, evokes the plant world, soil and reproduction. Also made from peacock feathers, it is composed of many modules of varying dimensions on a white background that nestles in the alcove like a cluster or deposit of spores from a ripening mushroom, leaving its mark on a blank page.
Elisabeth Martin, art historian

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Carole SOLVAY

BELGIUM

Carole Solvay was born in 1954. As a child, she spent her time watching swallows swooping overhead and the movement of the wind in the grasses, and listening to the rustling of the leaves. When she was out walking, she collected feathers she found on her way. Airy, organic feathers that are lightweight, complex, delicate yet robust. Black, white and ash-grey feathers, whose discreet beauty make the fluorescent sheen of a peacock’s feathers even more astonishing.
She taught herself to spin and weave through books and really acquired a taste for this solitary and repetitive work. She soon began to use feathers, that she would attach and thread onto wire, to create debarbed talismans. The first of her works created using this surprising material, took on living forms. “The ideas come to me as I work. I try to remain free and without expectations. I like it when something appears to be alive, poetic, or takes me by surprise.”
Carole Solvay joined an art school but after a few weeks, she realised that the demands of the academic system were not for her. Working only by instinct, she preferred to learn at her own pace and in her own way.
 
“I have a great need for peace-and-quiet and solitude, and my work is closely tied to my self-development. At the same time, this is building itself slowly, and this notion of space in time is very important to me.”
 
Carole Solvay’s work takes inspiration from nature, the sky, space, light and movements of grass and leaves that can barely be seen. Her life is full of stories of birds. She never consciously decided to work with feathers, it just happened, “but because every experience leads to another, I’m still there.”
As she evolves, her work evolves with her, becoming less and less figurative, more and more light and airy. Little by little, she moves away from the material itself and takes over more space, sculpting the light. Her feathers become a play on shapes and lines, sketching in thin air, encircling the emptiness, quivering in the breath of passing elements and being reborn much like a cocoon, mist hanging in the air, green fur, or a graceful colony of jellyfish or polyps.
Complete biography

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The Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire

Aquired by the Centre-Val de Loire Region in 2007, The Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire has become an unmissable site within the spheres of art and gardens. The triple identity of the Domaine : Heritage, art and gardens make for a unique visit within the circuit of the Loire Valley castles

Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire
41150 Chaumont-sur-Loire
Tel :+33 (0) 2 54 20 99 22
Fax :+33 (0) 2 54 20 99 24
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