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Marie Côté

La sédimentation d’un dessin (The Sedimentation of a Drawing), 2021

Raw clay from Saint-Hyacinthe on paper, porcelain (leaves), wood furniture

78.4” x 14.4” x 44.8” (196 cm x 36 cm x 112 cm)

$3,500 CDN (Please inquire for shipping)

Marie Côté’s La sedimentation d’un dessin (The Sedimentation of a Drawing), evokes a still-life – not as a series of objects, but as a site of time. Geologically, sedimentation is also a site of time, formed by deposits of mineral or organic particles at Earth's surface, compacting and cementing into solid rocks over time.

 

In 1968, the great land artist, Robert Smithson wrote: “Oxidation, hydration, carbonatization, and solution (the major processes of rock and mineral disintegration) are four methods that could be turned toward the making of art.” These are inherent to ceramic making, and to throw a lump of clay, is to invoke the major forces of pressure and centrifuge, as have the winds and oceans done to the earth. In fact, time as an interconnection between present and past, human and nature, is a central concern in her practice. Côté often ‘awakens’ her works though music and sound, each of which manifest unique material properties, depending on the land where she sourced her clay, saying: “Whenever I hold a lump of new clay in my hands, I have the feeling of discovering a singular world that carries a memory and tells, in its materiality, a territory and a history intimately linked to that of the communities that inhabit it.” Here, stories of present day human experience interweave with geologic time.

 

In this work, an ephemeral vortex of leaves, painted with raw clay collected along the rank of Saint-François in Saint-Hyacinthe, joins a group of porcelain leaves, resting in an open cabinet. Like stems, the drips connect the image to their porcelain counterparts below. The cabinet serves both as container (like cupped hands/open casket) and plinth, invoking preciousness – of the unique singularity of all life.

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