Hélène DeGott

   Hélène DeGott was born in Besançon, a small historic city in eastern France, where she lived until she was eighteen. Nature surrounds the city and feels omnipresent, almost omnipotent. She studied textile design at the École nationale supérieure des arts appliqués et métiers d’art (Olivier de Serres, Paris), then fashion design at La Cambre (Brussels) and Duperré (Paris).     After several professional experiences in textile creation and styling, she chose to root her practice in the visual arts, using the natural environment as a research laboratory. She continues the investigations begun during her studies around the body, colour, matter and volume, while seeking a slower pace and a calmer practice, away from the pressure of constant novelty.    With ink, she pursues gestures inspired by organic growth, attuned to the vast slowness of plant and mineral formation. Preparing these paintings and drawings is a reflective, almost mathematical exercise that breaks volume down into layers, like the growth rings of wood fibres or geological folds. For her, this layered logic is shared by the development of every living being and ensures continuity between forms. Through this practice, and through the explorations of natural environments that precede it, she seeks to make a community of forms and rhythms perceptible, and thereby understand the connections that link the living world without hierarchy.  This search for continuity also runs through the media she uses. Painting, drawing, photography and three-dimensional work are extensions of the same line of thought. Each medium participates in a transversal approach that lets her explore the same questions through a constant dialogue between gestures, materials and scales.     Analogies between organic tissue and textile fabric gradually establish themselves, shaping a world in which draping, lacing, pleating, crumpling, embroidery and leather dress and redefine plant, animal and mineral forms. Through embrace and interlacing, she weaves connections between species according to formal analogies. These alchemical fusions give rise to forms that can never be fully identified and that question the viewer’s intuition.