The Lightness of the Feather : A Writing and Gesture To the Imaginary

Visual artist Florence Coenraets is presenting her first solo show at Spazio Nobile, an invitation to take a sensory journey through new creations created for the gallery. This body of work comprises feather paintings and aerial compositions with evocative titles: ‘Atmosphères’, ‘Ciels’, ‘Cosmos’, ‘Haïkus’ and ‘Immersions’. 

Feathers have been used throughout the history of art and humanity. Both a drawing and writing instrument, often made from goose or even swan feathers, it is used to draw clean, precise lines of great artistic finesse. Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer used the nib in their sketches, preparatory studies and engravings. The feather has also been used as an ornamental, ritual and symbolic motif in the cultures of America, Oceania and Africa. Associated with beliefs, power and a connection with nature, feathers have been universally incorporated into the decorative arts, through masks, costumes and other cultural objects such as ornaments and jewellery. In Western art, the feather alone evokes lightness, freedom and a link with the universe, whether pagan or religious.

The feather finds a deep echo in ‘L'Air et les Songes’, where the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard explores the element of air, and the feather could be one of those images of lightness and elevation. He often associated air with freedom, creative inspiration and the aspiration towards the ideal, characteristics that are also found in the symbolism of the feather. The feather thus becomes a metaphor for poetic inspiration and the ability of the mind to soar beyond the material world, evoking a movement towards the invisible, the immaterial, or even the divine, similar to the flight of a bird. In ‘The Poetics of Daydreaming’, Bachelard takes these images, which allow us to detach ourselves from our everyday lives, a step further. The pen, as a writing tool, also symbolises the creative act and the freedom of the imagination. It is a medium of the mind, capturing and transforming daydreams into words. In this sense, the quill embodies the continuity between thought, dream and the creative act.

Florence Coenraets is part of a contemporary artistic movement that uses the pen as both an artistic and existential means of expression. She admires artists such as Rebecca Horn, Carole Solvay, Isa Barbier and Kate MccGwire, who explore the medium in subtle, powerful and sculptural ways. Using a phenomenological approach to the imagination and a direct approach to her favourite medium, Florence Coenraets invites us to think of the pen as an echo of a waking dream, faced with the richness of a palette of natural or supernatural colours, like a Fra Angelico ‘a fresco’ painting, a source of lightness and creativity.

The visual and tactile escape offered by the pen as a creative medium is an offering from the sky, a passage of a season, a migration to an elsewhere inhabited by the space and footprints that dot her territory. While studying architecture, she discovered Land Art and Arte Povera, and immersed herself in Georges Didi-Huberman's book Être crâne, where she immersed herself in the work of Giuseppe Penone, questioning the link between man and nature. In this relationship with nature, which is described in filigree throughout Florence Coenraets's creations, we wonder how she shapes her artistic vision beyond the title of ‘feather artist’? She explains it very spontaneously: ‘My practice begins by immersing my hands in the material. The feather immediately puts me in touch with this natural material, from the animal world, from birds. It touches me immediately. Feathers allow me to forge an intimate link with the living world, where every detail - colour, texture, lightness - becomes a source of inspiration. This intuitive, physical relationship with matter nourishes my work, while reviving memories and sensations experienced in the heart of nature. I define myself as a visual artist working with feathers as my preferred material. I am also attached to the traditional techniques and skills of featherwork, which I enrich through my artistic approach.

When Florence Coenraets asks her about the imprint left by birds and the space they inhabit, and what brings her closer to it, she refers to the questions posed by Vinciane Despret, ethnologist and philosopher: ‘In my artistic practice, I intend to question our relationship with living things through my work with materials. One material has become central to this practice: feathers. I don't know what makes me similar to birds. It's our differences that make me curious. I love being confronted with otherness. The feather is a trace of the bird but also of a volatile presence. The feather remains my medium for my relationship with living things.

Florence Coenraets spent several months in Florence, where she was immersed in Renaissance art. This Italian painting has an impact on her ‘feather paintings’, which she calls ‘Immersions’. ‘Being immersed in the sacred art of this period of history was a powerful emotional experience. I was particularly moved by the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, and by their magnificent palette of colours, which were very present and palpable. This is undoubtedly linked to the ‘a fresco’ technique, where the paintings are literally part of the walls. It's this liveliness that inspires my ‘Immersions’. Going into churches has also had a big influence on my imagination. I find textures of light that range from the dark and half-light to the reflections of stained glass on stone. They are also a source of inspiration for my ‘Atmosphères’ mobiles.

Immersions’ evokes for her this impregnation of the body by the environment. As she puts it: ‘It's a bit like stepping into a “Penetrable”, an immersive sculpture by Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto, which lets you “feel” the presence of the environment on your skin. The feather connects me powerfully to existence. My sensory memory, soaked in life, is awakened: the delicate freshness of the dew, the dazzle of a ray of sunlight, the soothing envelopment of the forest. These moments of pure wonder, exploration and freedom in my childhood carved a deep connection with nature, making it an inexhaustible source of inspiration. It was by drawing on my sensory memory that I approached ‘Immersions’. My first large-format work, Immersion IV, Bruissement, evoked a childhood memory of living in the heart of a dense forest that let in a few rays of light like the stained-glass windows of a church. ‘Immersion IX, Ravissement" expresses intense joy, and the last three “Immersions” created for my solo exhibition are linked to water. The body in water, immersed in a lake, an ocean, the immensity is in syntony with aquatic sensations and movements’.

Interested in women artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay, Anni Albers, Tapta, Ruth Asawa and Olga de Amaral, she is attracted by their approach to both colour and material, and the way they embrace the world in three dimensions through their paintings, tapestries and textile and multi-material works of art. Feathers also have the ability to sculpt space and make it sublime. ‘The feather makes space sensitive, combining matt and shine, power and lightness, density and transparency. Its texture gives depth to space and emotions. Artists who work with a textile medium bring together colour and texture in a single gesture,’ she continues. ‘It's this same precise, immediate gesture that I use in the ‘Immersions’. Each feather is a touch of colour. When superimposed, the colours blend together, whereas in the ‘Haïkus’, each particularity of this material, such as the line, the shape, the reflection, is used in a precise way to depict a landscape. A large part of my process involves sorting the feathers. This painstaking process sharpens my eye and connects me powerfully to their texture and creative potential.

To describe the link that binds her to her medium, Florence Coenraets refers to a long quotation from the artist Anni Albers in her manifesto ‘On designing’: ‘How do we choose our specific material, our means of communication? Accidentally. Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness. It catches us and asks us to shape ourselves. We find our language and, as we go along, we learn to obey its rules and limits. We must obey and adapt to its demands. Ideas come to us and, although we feel that we are the creator, we are involved in a dialogue with our medium. The more subtly we listen to our medium, the more inventive our actions become. Not listening to it leads to failure... What I'm trying to get across is that the material is a means of communication. That listening to it, not dominating it, makes us truly active, in other words: being active, being passive. The more you listen, the closer you get to art.

Florence Coenraets' “Atmosphères” mobiles, which unfurl freely in space, connect with architecture, while her “Immersions” are linked to painting through their relationship with the hand, the tool and the material. She explains how she plays with feathers in her mobiles: ‘The feathers are arranged to capture and modulate the light. By suspending the feathers in a sculptural composition, they take flight and become light, airy structures. These mobiles create movement, moving with the slightest breeze and filtering light to create a subtle play of shadows cast in the surrounding space. In ‘Immersions’, the feathers are arranged in successive layers. Each feather is the equivalent of a brushstroke. I augment the natural colour palette by hand-dyeing the goose feathers to offer a wide variety of tones similar to natural gradations. Translucent feathers are layered to create new shades, giving depth and a painterly quality to the composition. I also use feathers with slight imperfections, this adds authenticity, honouring the raw and natural essence of the material.’

Sensitive to the creations of artists such as El Anatsui, Edith Dekyndt, Barthélémy Togo, Peter Doig and Roni Horn, she appreciates both their quality as colourists and magicians with materials, and their unexpected, strange yet highly spontaneous artistic compositions, which remain highly sophisticated. ‘I like them for different reasons,’ she says. ‘El Anatsui is close to the textile artists I mentioned earlier. He creates a shimmering weave from recycled material. In Edith Dekyndt's work, I like the link she establishes with materials. For her, every material is ‘alive’, and this is what she establishes in her work through a scientific and contextual approach. It's this ‘site-specific’ dimension that I want to develop in the ‘Ciels’ series, which consists of works made from feathers collected in a specific area. I'd like to work with ornithologists and link each feather to a bird, its history, its habitat, etc.’.

Although the lightness and evanescence that characterise feathers lead her to make them exist in a more permanent way, as a given moment, almost photographic, a painting animated by imaginary forms as if captured in a dream, Florence Coenraets believes that ‘symbolically, feathers weave a link between earth and sky, between the visible and the invisible. It reminds me of the ancient Egyptian figure of the Ba-bird, which brings together the body of a bird and the figure of a deceased person. The ‘ba’ is a spiritual principle that takes flight when the deceased dies.

Her ‘Haikus’ evoke the short, profound Japanese ‘seasonal’ poems that are expressions of the ephemeral, of impermanence. She speaks of them as capturing memories, places and feelings that link a space, a landscape and real or fictional emotions. ‘They are narrative landscapes that attempt to capture the essence of a moment. They establish a relationship with memory and the passing of time. Each Haïku is an imaginary landscape that brings together memories of moments lived, heard, felt or dreamt.

A traveller at heart, Florence Coenraets has spent time in Spain, India, Cuba, Brazil, Egypt, Mexico, Syria, Senegal and the United States. In the course of her wanderings, she has come to realise that the feather is the emblem of peoples in every corner of the planet. Whether linked to pagan or religious rituals, it represents a sense of belonging to a territory and a culture. ‘The use of feathers refers to our beliefs, our culture and the links we have with our environment. Among indigenous peoples, feathers never play an accidental role; they refer to their cosmology and appear at the beginning of many stories. Cultural objects adorned with feathers are at the heart of these relationships. As in my ‘ Skies’ series, the feathers are linked to a territory because they come from birds that are present ‘ in situ’.

Playing on the dichotomy between the palpable and the impalpable, the feather is as synonymous with writing, the trace and the indelible as it is with flight, freedom, appearance and disappearance. She invokes today's environmental issues, with climate change and everything that puts our survival in question. Florence Coenraets believes that there is ‘something nostalgic about using this material derived from living organisms, because its presence evokes absence. In the ‘Ciels’ series, the feathers collected are traces of bird species that nest or migrate from one territory to another. The presence or absence of certain birds bears witness to climate change, as migratory routes are greatly disrupted by these transformations.

Florence Coenraets also points out that: ‘Most of the feathers I use come from farmyard birds intended for consumption, such as roosters, hens, guinea fowl, pheasants, ducks and geese. It's a material from the food industry that I'm revaluing in my artistic practice. I buy from specialist breeders and sellers who respect the Washington Convention and the protection of birds. I also receive feathers from hunters, mainly ducks and pheasants.

For Florence Coenraets, this journey into the poetic world of the pen takes in ‘Immersions’, ‘Haïkus’, ‘Atmosphères’, ‘Cosmos’ and ‘Skies’. It reveals that everything is interconnected: the earth, the cosmos, the real and the imaginary. Does the pen transcend this feeling of existence and this ‘intoxication of metamorphosis’, to paraphrase Stefan Zweig? The pen also transforms itself and takes us on a journey to meet the elements, air, wind, water and fire. Florence Coenraets recounts this journey in just a few lines, into a new world that is shifting, changing and original all at once. She evokes the novel ‘The Waves’ by the British author Virginia Wolf: ‘I am convinced that we are one with nature, that we inhabit our environment as much as it inhabits us. It is this interdependence that I seek to make visible and sensitive.

It's a form of communion that she offers visitors in search of intimacy, grace and a palpable gentleness in the midst of a vast world that is becoming increasingly chaotic. In this, Florence Coenraets evokes the philosopher Anne Dufourmentelle and her book La Puissance de la Douceur. ‘It' s an invitation to feel gentleness, because it connects us to life. We don't talk much about gentleness, yet it's through our experience of it that we feel what binds us to the world and enables us to be at one with it. I need this gentleness to counter my anxieties. It's an invitation to place ourselves on the side of the living and to want to take care of it. I've chosen an ‘experiential’ setting at Spazio Nobile for this, my first solo exhibition. The atmosphere I want to create is one of travel: being transported to another place, soaking up new sensations with the ‘Immersions’, observing landscapes with the ‘Haïkus’, being touched by the atmosphere created by the slow movements of the ‘Atmosphères’ mobiles and their play of light and shadow, and taking a piece of this sensory experience home with you.

A pen-gesture, an imprint of the self.

Lise Coirier, November 2024