Louise Chardon
Louise Chardon first language is dance. For more than 40 years, she devoted her life to "being in motion" and to the intuitive listening of the subconscious through dance. Drawing has always been part of her life and intimately intertwined with dancing. Her approach to drawing and sculpting, intuitive and cathartic, more motional than visual, are like extra limbs: she explores and experiences dancing, drawing and sculpting as sensory immersions into the folds, depth, cracks and shadows of the body - her body - in search of the invisible and the intangible.
Through dance, drawing, sculpture, and video, she explores and transcends the singular and shared dimensions of being. Her work gives form to the multiple facets of existence, the plural truths that coexist within a living being, all her expressions being the craving tentacles and screaming mouths of several existences in one same body.
sculpting
Louise's sculptures are born from “humble” and natural materials — raw earth, wax, flax fiber, wood, raw wool, pigments, hair, bones, old textiles — all infused with memory, transformation, fermentation. Through matter, Louise contemplates life within death, movement within stillness. The forms she creates often seem to invaginate, merge, intertwine, penetrate, wrap themselve in an irresistible desire to disappear.
drawing
Louise's approach to drawing is rooted in proprioception, more than in vision. The materials she chooses bear marks and alterations that give them a timeless quality. Louise often draws from a body in motion. Her drawings become reincarnations of motional states. Often, she enters a drawing by yielding into the perceptual field of her body, and with both hands and closed eyes, in a blind and fervent kinesthetic introspection, she draws the inner landscape she is engulfed into, as revisiting an oniric landscape.
performing
After performing for International dance companies and independent choreographers, Louise establishes in Antwerp (Belgium) with Luk Van den Dries a production house (AndWhatBeside(s)Death) and a platform (the CarWash Theater) for performing arts. Together they realized several performances under the genre Intimate and Sensitive Theater. Now based in Portugal, still in collaboration with Luk Van den Dries, she runs an artistic hermitage named A Mandorla, in the midst of the authentic landscapes of Alentejo (Pt). The vastness of the surrounding nature became the inspirational source from where Louise unfolds further her performative expression, which she shares regularly and punctually with the local cultural community.
[email protected] // +351 910 518 // amandorla.pt