Astrid de la Forest

“At Chaumont-sur-Loire, I drew from life, in ink, on the paths that wind across its grounds, sketching the outlines of tall trees and birds in flight. On a night I spent there, I dreamt that my body gradually discarded its borders and I turned into a tree and a bird at the same time, as if two ancient forces had agreed to whisper the same story.

It was from this intimate metamorphosis that my exhibition was born. Where tree and bird meet. As if the verticality of those great trees naturally invoked the momentum of flight.

This work is resolutely sentimental. It results from close observation of Chaumont-sur-Loire’s landscape and a dream that sought to reconfigure it. Here, nature no longer appears as a simple environment, but as an active force to negotiate with. It acts on me, slowly settling on me until it becomes inner structures.”

Astrid de La Forest was born in 1962 and trained at the Higher School of Graphic Arts (ESAG) in rue du Dragon. After she graduated, she joined the Théâtre des Amandiers’ set design team led by Richard Peduzzi and Patrice Chéreau. She worked as an illustrator in various media and spent 10 years as a courtroom sketch artist for television, at political and criminal trials; the travelling exhibition Traits de justice [Features of Justice] organised by the Centre Pompidou looks back at that experience.

The artist, who lives and works between Paris and Thomery (77), initially focused on painting, turning to printmaking in 1995. She worked with the Lacourière-Frélaut workshops whose final exhibition was devoted to her, then with René Tazé and finally with Raymond Meyer in Pully in Switzerland, with whom she developed the special techniques enabling her to create large formats in monotypes and on matrices alike. Astrid de La Forest’s subjects are essentially taken from nature, the animal world, and watercolour portraits she transcribes into large-format prints.