In her intimate relationship with her creation, Constance Lanxade dresses with shells places, walls, mirrors, surfaces, just as a seamstress would make her clothes on the mannequin upon placed orders or simply for a collection that she exhibited like the “Banquet of Olympus” last summer at the water area of the Old Port of Marseille.
Meditation is necessary for this work of “haute couture”: the choice of materials, colors, reflection, vo- lumes, cutting style and other intended details that seek to take shape, coming to life again dressed in the costume that was set out for them, from a range of shells used to mention them.
Collecting, sorting, ordering, assembling, composing, gluing techniques: encountering this organic and sensual material, which appeared on earth over 200 million years ago, and from thousands of miles away from Constance, becomes another form of meditation, an extension of his Rinzai Zen practice initia- ted more than 20 years ago.
«It’s upon an encounter with a model or an intention that one is immersed in contemplation, a journey though a different time and space, a touch with this everlasting moment and this mystery of creation. This is what I feel when I pick my shells and I create from this noble and natural material, and what the diver- sity of these shells prompts me to do: work with a unique, varied, original piece every time.
It’s because shells amaze us.
I’ve picked them since I was a child and I’ve come to collect them, striving to give them a different future than to be simply buried in the sand. Over the course of my peregrinations, and because I love strolling down beaches, all that I see is enriched by these stranded jewels coming from earth’s every sea and ocean.
I come from a long line of Naval officers and my ancestors bring me back these jewels of the sea. They are piously preserved in glass cases like treasures because they are filled with memories and stories of their distant travels, and fired the imagination of so many generations”.
Constance Lanxade, originally a psychoanalyst, created the Généapsy School 15 years ago seeking to share her expertise in psychogenealogy and generation analysis. Throughout her work she takes interest in myths, symbols and archetypes as an ancient form of language in which she releases inspiration to account for games of strength, dynamics and structures in the transmission of ancestry.
«How I love to revitalize myself with this geometry that structures living things; it is on my way to Compos- tela that I came up with the idea of bringing the Gods of Olympus together, which I had to study anyway. The Olympian gesture depicts both instinctual archetypes and protection at work in the human psyche. Uniting the Gods at the Banquet of Olympus was a way to invite our impulses to a healthy balance. It also gave me the pretext to accompany it with a work of fiction called «confidences of the seamstress» to unveil in what state of mind each god had chosen their outfit for the banquet »
According to the tradition of cabinets of curiosities, by recycling this sumptuous natural material, the work of Constance Lanxade wishes to participate to the re-enchantment of the world!