Alice Aucuit’s preferred medium is ceramics – a traditional craft that she combines with contemporary transfer and reproduction techniques. Working in series with evocative titles, she lays the groundwork for production by immersing herself in a location and its history with which her works can interact. Archéologie absente (Absent Archaeology), Parodie (Parody), La part des anges (The Angels’ Share) and L’écho des Berceuses (The Echo of Lullabies) each tackle a heritage that is both visible and invisible, and which serves as a starting point for new narratives. “I unpick fairy tales, myths and current news items, and use them to weave anachronistic and syncretic stories that I embroider onto the canvas of Humanity”, she says. From the intimate to the universal, from the sacred to the popular, these stories feature love, creation, femininity and death, and end up resonating in the collective unconscious. These topics are deeply visible in the hearts and bones of the series Kèr and Bone China, which carry an implicit memory of bodies and fairy tales – cathartic, like as many vanitas.

Leïla Quillacq, 2020.