Expanding worlds
Léa Habourdin
2023
The “ Forest-image: expanding worlds“ series documents the new primary forests in mainland France and the weight of our presence in these territories. Léa Habourdin uses the properties of plants to print her photographies, she manufactures pigments in pastel shades, insolates ephemeral anthotypes and dyes fabrics for tailor-made installations.
The impermanence of so-called “wild” or “untouched” places is the backbone of forest images. This fragility is omnipresent in the work of Léa Habourdin, here she presents monochromatic prints with luminous and soft colors coming from the pigments she extracts from plants. Here the fragility is not the print itself, since it is perennial, but in this ghostly transparency that Léa Habourdin gives to the forest, so much so that we believe we are looking at it through the fog of our thoughts.
Her work is based on a simple observation recounted in the article “Where are Europe’s last primary forests”: primary forests no longer exist in France. It is the untouched forests that survive: a natural place that has not suffered a strong influence from us in recent decades.
In the same way that we collect wood to make a fire, Léa Habourdin collects plants to produce her images. From the bright yellow of the birch leaves to the pale pink of the poppy petals, including gaude, madder or persicaria, the representation of the forests here is perennial but very evanescent. It reveals without giving completely, leaving the possibility of resonating with the personal and comforting image, the fantasy that we all have of a primary forest.
Born in 1985 in northern France, Léa Habourdin first studied printmaking at the Estienne school in Paris then photography at the Arles school. Attentive to the diversity of forms of life, her practice seeks to draw other ways of resonating with worlds. She observes the relationship we have with other animals, with landscapes and summons the notions of survival, fracture, reconstruction to compose another view of what we call “the wild”. Exploring fields such as ethology, research in applied science and even botany, she deploys work in drawing and photography where the place of the book and the printed object is crucial.
Her work has been rewarded numerous times, she was notably awarded the Carte Blanche PMU – BAL in 2015, the CIPGP research grant in 2019, and the CNAP creation assistance grant in 2020. In addition, she has exhibited in several festivals (Photo Phnom Penh in Cambodia, Lianzhou festival in China, Photo Saint Germain in Paris).
In 2018, she exhibited “Survivalists” at the GoEun Museum in South Korea and took advantage of the opening of the exhibition to launch her publishing house: Mille Cailloux where the act of editing will be thought of as an artistic practice.
Her latest work “Forest Images: Worlds in Extension” was the subject of a solo exhibition during the Rencontres d’Arles in 2022. In 2023, she won the PhotoLondon Emergent Photographer of the Year prize.
