A Life Woven in Grass
Roussel’s Thoughts Behind “Lives of Grass“
In her “Life of Grass” series, Mathilde Roussel creates sculptures using recycled materials, soil, and wheat grass seeds. Behind the beauty of watching living things grow, this piece of art carries a message.
The natural world, ingested as food, becomes a component of the human being. Through these anthropomorphic and organic sculptures made of soil and wheat grass seeds, I strive to show that food, it’s origin, it’s transport, has an impact on us beyond it’s taste. The power inside it affects every organ of our body.
In this exploration, Roussel investigates our inner selves and how this space impacts the world around us. As the artist states, she wants to explore “the shape, the color, the dimension of our mental landscape.” Through watching things grow, we begin to see the investment and time it takes to create the food we eat, and also learn to give it more respect.
Observing nature and being aware of what and how we eat might make us more sensitive to food cycles in the world – of abundance, of famine – and allows us to be connected to a global reality.”
To create this work, Roussel used recycled materials (inc. metal) and fabric filled with soil and wheat grass seeds. The combination of man-made and earth-made materials is quite interesting I think as there is a crossover, a grey-area of what is in control of what. The grass grows out and overcomes the material and metal but these are what contains it and holds it together, or is it the artist who has complete control because she is the one who sculpted the man-made materials but the grass does it’s own thing.
The work is a ‘metaphor for our bodies’ transformations over time as well as a reminder that we are one with nature’. Roussel plays on this in her title ‘Lives of Grass’, this could be the life of the grass itself, as this is growing, or the life of the human shape that Roussel has made or a combination of the two, the human and the nature are blended together – we rely on nature to keep us alive.
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