Art Brussels

Since its beginnings, Maëlle Dufour (1994) has focused on creating sculptural and monumental installations that question the destruction of living resources and the environment by humans. Her works often reflect an era and a history, and bear testimony to what persists. They are like ruins torn from their original context and rehabilitated in the field of art. Created in glass and mirrors in natural landscapes, her recent works underline the human propensity to always want to control nature by opposing it with the artificiality of his work.

For the special context of the Art Brussels fair, Maëlle Dufour is producing hundreds of ceramic Oyas whose shape and material are reminiscent of plastic jerrycans. These jars, usually buried near plants as an ancestral soil irrigation system, sound the alarm about the disappearance of water, now quoted on the stock market in the same way as oil.

A toxic and cumbersome landscape, the accumulation of ceramics, half oya, half jerrycan, falls into the fair, which excess and over-consumption have not spared. Wedged between two immaculate picture walls, the Oyas spread across a synthetic green lawn that evokes the artificiality of the world and the ordered nature of our gardens. Revealing the absurdity of our modes of production and consumption, this accumulation produces a heap of hybrid objects that have become useless in a space where visitors struggle to find their place.

With the support of Fédération Wallonie-Brussels