Brittany: Images, Things and Places

Maura Coughlin (Bryant University) Elodie La Villette: The Bas-Fort Path at Low Tide, Dieppe for OBJECT LESSONS at ASLE, August 2021.

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2021/09/object-lessons-at-asle-2021.html

Update: Our first reviews! Gillen D’Arcy Wood in  Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (NCAW)  and Rebecca Bedell in ISLE . My university is featuring video and podcast versions intervie...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2019/05/podcast.html

An in-conversation with art historian Maura Coughlin and artists Kahn & Selesnick exploring the series of art historical references that have influenced their work.

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2020/04/danse-macabre.html

Cécile Borne finds her subject matter and materials on the tide line. She is a multi media artist based in Douarnenez, Brittany. Like the gleaner who was so often painted or photographed pick...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2020/02/cecile-borne-tideline-gleaner-part-one.html

Elodie La Villette is an understudied late-nineteenth-century French marine artist who had an exceptional ecological sensibility. Her images of the interstitial world of the coastlines of Brittan...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2020/01/gleaning-tideline.html

Before the chapel of Notre Dame de Perros-Hamon, in the town of Ploubazlanec, near Paimpol (Brittany), a young boy was photographed by Charles or Paul Géniaux in about 1900. His seafaring co...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2020/01/gift-boat.html

Paul Géniaux, Marais Salant, Billiers.  Early 20th century, Rennes. SILVER SALTS: REALISM AND MATERIALITY IN A FRENCH PHOTOGRAPH, C. 1900 Working close to home, Paul Géniaux (1873-1929),...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2017/06/salt-proposal-for-new-essay.html

In the summer of 2012 the innovative ecomuseum in Douarnenez, The Port-Musée/ Musée du Bateau presented an exhibition, Fibres Marines as part of a larger regional theme (Chanvre et Lin/ ...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2018/02/hemp-and-linen-material-actors.html

 Last week, we were on a two- week trip to Brittany.  One afternoon, while installed in Douarnenez, we set out to find the Neolithic covered alley at Lesconil (c. 3500-2000 BCE), just ou...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2016/08/disappointing-stones_15.html

(May, 2016) Please note:  I'm republishing this two years after I wrote the following post because a new version of this show is currently on view at the Musée de la Marine in Paris.  The ...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2014/05/terre-neuve-terre-neuvas.html

Returning (again) to seaweed , never having left it. Millet's stooping figure becomes a seaweed gleaner at the ecomuseum. A talk I gave several years ago about thrift and recuperation in ...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2015/07/entangled-bank-seaweed-part-2.html

A conference on Jean-François Millet in Normandy in the fall of 2000 took me to the 17th-century manor house at Cerisy-la-Salle , not too far from Millet's birthplace in Gruchy at the end of th...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2015/07/past-tasks-in-round.html

"... all creatures of tidal rocks are hidden from view, but the gulls know what is there, and they know that in time the water will fall away again and give them entrance to the strip between th...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2014/08/shore-birds-feathers-fashion-and-trash.html

Amédée Rosier, Mussel Picking at Low Tide, Environs of Trouville (or Shrimp Fishing, Sunset) 1868. Musée d'Orsay. Detail. Walking a beach in Normandy and repeating what Agnès Varda term...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2014/07/beachcoming-and-digression-white-stone.html

Among the permanent collection at the Morlaix Musée des Jacobins is a painting whose ecological realism has gone unremarked, as far as I can tell. This is Sand Boats (c. 1900-02), by André Dauc...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2014/05/maerl-sand.html

Elodie La Villette, Chemin du Bas Fort Blanc, Dieppe, 1885,  Musée de Morlaix  (photo taken by the author in 2014 with permission) One of the many great paintings owned by the Musée de...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2014/05/elodie-la-villette-on-rocky-strand.html

At last I put my hands on a copy of Jean Epstein's 1929 film Finis Terrae, shot in 1928 on the Breton islands of Bannec and Ouessant. The story is simple: four men (kelp harvesters known as go�...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2014/02/finis-terrae.html

  THE PHOTO OF A FORMER VILLAGE IN NORTHERN FRANCE IS FRAMED WITH TEXTS ABOVE AND BELOW IT, SOMETHING LIKE YOU SEE HERE. TOBY EVERETT AND I took this a few days before Christmas in 2013. It was...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2014/02/douaumont.html

PART 2: ISLAND TO ISLAND: INDIGO AND BRITTANY IN BLUE CULTURAL STUDIES Indigo manufacture, Central Carolina, from 'Le Costume Ancien et Moderne', Volume I, plate 51, by Jules Ferrario, publis...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2013/10/indigo-2.html

The new satellite Louvre in Lens France (a town notorious for the unrivaled height of its coal slag heaps) is a remarkable case of a museum design in a dialogue with its site. This and other ...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2013/12/art-things-at-new-louvre-in-lens.html

  On the island of Ouessant, novelist and folklorist Anatole Le Braz “discovered” a unique death custom involving an object called ‘proëlla:’  n a country where all the men are sail...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2013/12/proella.html

    The cemetery in the village of Ploubazlanec on the North Coast area (Cotes d’Armor) of Brittany has a Wall of the Disappeared at Sea. In this area, many boys and men departed from the p...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2013/12/wall-of-disappeared.html

Planning a trip to Northern France later this month, I thought of revisiting the cemetery of St. Hilaire at Marville (the oldest cemetery in France), where I had photographed a remarkable colle...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-falling-away.html

A short piece on Skull Boxes written recently for the Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion at Yale.  I will be spoke about these at Observatory in Brooklyn on...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-short-piece-on-skull-boxes-written.html

Indigo democratized blue.  My obsessions with indigo in textiles and the history of indigo in global trade have at last materialized into an argument of sorts, with an aim to look at blue cloth...

http://materialbrittany.blogspot.com/2013/10/indigo-part-1.html