Amandine Massé

In the work she made at EKWC, Amandine Massé explores her childhood drawings. Flowers, bees and butterflies, the sun, the clouds, houses, trees, people, monsters, embroidered on cloth in lines of colourful yarn or drawn with crayon on black ceramics. They are confusingly naïve. Unlike Cobra paintings for instance, that are always distinctly adult, Massé’s drawings suggest a genuine connection to earlier forms of imagination. Her ceramic sheets are punctured with holes meant to embroider contours, but she leaves most of them open; only the moon shines in bright yellow stitches, a thread connecting past and present in a single poetic gesture. She also embroiders porcelain handkerchiefs with words in Provençal that refer to childhood and dreams, like embabouchi, the state between waking and sleeping. Some drawings are framed by ceramic windows and curtains for a children’s bedroom: they evoke a sense of falling, receding ever deeper into inaccessible regions.