MAUNET Isabelle, Guest artist for the collective exhibition Jardins Invisbles

French artist born on the banks of the Creuse River and living on the banks of the Loire, she works in Tours and along the coast of the Côtes d’Armor, balancing the gentle charm of Tours with the sea air. With a doctorate in literature, she has published several anthologies and essays on experimental poetry—including visual, elementary, spatial, concrete, and total poetry—with Al Dante and Presses du réel. After teaching literature at the university to Master’s students preparing for careers in teaching, she now devotes herself entirely, as an artist, to exploring the writings of the living world—the bio-mineral, plant, and animal traces and deposits of this living world—while maintaining her sensitivity to experimentation, materiality, and gesture.

More broadly, she draws inspiration from the connections between science and nature, art and landscape, image and word, seeking to bring together the infinitely large and the infinitely small, the immutable and the ephemeral, celestial constellations and limestone deposits, writings and animal forms…
She collects from her surroundings basic natural materials and discarded industrial materials, patterns, shapes, textures, and colors, seeking not to fix them but to experience them, let them speak, and extend them. To open up the multiple passages between the different realms (mineral, plant, fungal, human-animal) and bring them into resonance without hierarchy, she “manipulates” various mediums: drawing, painting, photography, video, installation, sculpture, sound.
Seeking to make visible lithic, telluric, and aquatic forces and correspondences, to unveil deposits of all kinds by transposing them into drawings or assemblages, and to turn toward systems of points, lines, paths, and writing in the broadest sense, her hybrid creations question the origins of both life and art.

The works presented for the exhibition Invisible Gardens explore and reveal the secret depths of aquatic environments—whether marine or fluvial—by highlighting traces, signs, outcrops, and deposits that bear witness to different spaces and compress different strata of time