Mathilde Caylou

“La porosité du territoire” (The porosity of land) is a 46-page artistic cartography of the Vendée landscape, designed with Joanna Spadiliero and illustrated by the artist’s research and her works produced in situ. It is published in 600 copies.

A graduate of the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg (Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin) and trained in workshops in France, Germany and Denmark, Mathilde Caylou is an artist whose glasswork borders contemporary art and craftsmanship.

During her stay in Rocheservière, the artist traveled across Vendée, from land to shore, to get inspired and create an original cartography of its different landscapes.

A stroll around Vendée, “La porosité du territoire” (The porosity of land) is an extra step in Mathilde Caylou’s work. The artist, who has worked on the topics of land and landscape as seen through the prism of matter, specifically glass, pursues her investigation on the interactions between natural elements, between man and his surrounding space.

She could have used the plural form for her title, given the way in which the porosity she explores can take on multiple forms, summon multiple actors and intervene in different places. Physical porosity – her residency was guided by the absorption and resurgence of water. But also mental – this porosity denies any conception of nature as simply decorative or as a source of productivity. Rather, it underlines its common roots with the peasant, the landscape and the country, reaffirming how impossible it is to dissociate man from his surroundings and culture. The use of the singular form corroborates this global vision of the territory.

“La porosité du territoire” also offers a point of view on the physical and cultural characteristics the landscape displayed to Mathilde Caylou during her long walks from the Atlantic Ocean to the Site Saint-Sauveur, meeting those who live and make the territory. She reveals these characteristics in a new and contemplative way. Her approach retraces the journey she took through the grove and marsh, from land to ocean, following water and its stream as a breadcrumb trail.

Over the years, along with the seasons, movements induced by natural or man-caused events, water constantly transforms the soil. The earth, vegetation and liquid element intermingle and come into dialogue through common shapes.

A memory and sculptural topography of the land, like a snapshot fixed on mineral material whose amorphous state is between solid and liquid, this proposal attempts to extract and freeze a layer of historical strata whose soil no longer shows visible trails, due to its perpetual mutations. The artist plays with the material, light and transparency of glass to reveal these textures and shapes, and to transcribe her vision of this reality, encouraging us to observe and rediscover it from a different angle.