UN ARBRE À SOI: GENEVIEVE LEVIVIER

With profound materiality, Geneviève Levivier’s ritualistic process involves both collecting and creating, making works at the nexus of body and spirit, Nature and Self. Her approach to collecting embraces a broad spectrum: plants, recycled textiles, natural fiber residues, pages of classic texts from her family's library. With these found ingredients, she weaves a new narrative, transcending the material history of the elements gathered, in the image of the shifting, interconnected “Self” described by psychoanalysis.

Through her work with organic and textile materials, particularly in the recurring motif of tree bark, which she photographs and then transposes into abstractions, Levivier rekindles our connection to Nature and its essential materiality. The veins of the Tree, subtly revealed in her weavings and laser engravings, bring us back to our roots deeply anchored in the earth, evoking the all-encompassing, reticular character of our planet – a perspective too often lacking in our world in crisis.

And with Nature as her primary source of inspiration, summoning up the luminous horizon of a clearing or the intoxicating dazzle of snow, she also speaks of the anguishing melting of glaciers, and the burnt woods of great fires. For the Self encompasses all these facets, and the textile, sometimes supple and enveloping, sometimes sculpted and tormented, becomes the witness to our shared history and the symbol of humanity seeking a better world.