HÉAU Aline, Photography, guest artist, La fabrique des éléments

Aline Héau lives and works in the Loire Valley (France).
Trained in analog photography at the dawn of the digital era, she deepened her knowledge of the medium’s history while building a collection of vintage photographs. This historical approach feeds her artistic practice.
She explores cyanotype, a 19th-century photographic process traditionally used on paper, which she transposes onto glass and other materials. In a practice inspired by «scientific marvel,» she meticulously investigates the natural world, particularly plant and mineral life. The distinctive blue of cyanotype becomes transparent and elevates the subject. Aline Héau was the visual artist of the 2020–21 season at the Concertgebouw in Bruges. Since 2020, she has exhibited her glass cyanotypes in France, Belgium, and China.
Camera-less photographs, these cyanotypes play with matter and light.

First come the cells and the contagious spread across Voronoï surfaces. The propagation morphs into organic, whimsical colonies. From this primordial chaos, softened forms then emerge. They are soothing, and their harmonic vibration spreads through the void. Finally, the eye is projected into the distance. Space contracts, expands, and bursts into shards of light.

This is The Blue Peril, the space between us and infinity, the unsettling invisible written in negative.
The viewer is invited on a journey: from the microscopic to the cosmic, from the intimate to the sidereal.