Shops in Fabras, Ardèche

Opening : All year round.

Plastician, sculptor, ceramist, engraver, Martine Diersé has been living at the Château du Pin since 1994 where her works are always on show.

For Martine Diersé, sculpture – primarily ceramic and wood – is not meant to be placed on a pedestal but to be intimately intertwined with vegetation in the gardens she designs, integrated into raw or landscaped settings, traditional or contemporary architecture.

The skulls, legs – and those hands at the ends of arms – that Martine Diersé wrests from the earth to fire them, sometimes glazing them, are born of love. Raised, monstrous, brought to human gaze, at human height – signals swollen with life, tormented fragments, fragments in supplication – these limbs and skulls are our fragments. Our memory in fragments. They are warm, dry; their cavities and flat surfaces, their texture and shine, radiate. This irradiation, made of terror and insolence, evokes the fall and resurrection of bodies. The charnel house and prayer. Sumptuousness and abstraction. As if the sculptor, haunted by dismemberment, torture, and decapitation, were questioning, with her fingers, the unknown fate of the tormented. From these kneaded, fired shapes emerge terrible relics. Here is the thigh, the leg, the foot, the hand, the head – and here they are multiplied as pains, births, and deaths are multiplied: it is up to us to imagine their human dimensions, the race and gesture that animated them, the integrity of their consciousness and gaze.

The artist’s anguish, her material dream, a dream of earth, has ruptured the joints, deformed the jaws, enucleated, desiccated the flesh, or, conversely, hypertrophied it. We, standing before these sculptures, think of the warmth of bodies, the rustle of lips. The fear that arises when contemplating the work fractures. The strength and refinement of the modeling, the magnificence of the glaze, the astonishment of the furnace, conjure vivid, intact bodies, emerging from their own chaos. In high-temperature firing, there comes a moment: through the kiln's observation window, one sees the clay reaching an unbearable white. This blaze irradiates the clay from within. It moves, one hears the breath of the fire – a respiration. The violence of the turmoil felt in front of Martine Diersé’s works plunges us precisely into the ambiguity of this metamorphosis.