My relation to clay is peculiar. For my whole artistic life it has been present as a central
element to my production, yet I have only rarely used it as a medium in itself, creating clay figures
mostly as tools for my short films. Through the ongoing series CLAYFACES, I intend to pay tribute
to this amazing material, display the beauty of its ever changing textures, and reflect on my
relationship to it.
Most children play with play dough. Unfortunately, most of them also stop when growing
up. In a way, I didn’t. My practice, and my objective when modelling might have evolved a bit, but
the childish joy of shaping matter, the amazement at producing something out of a handful of mud,
has stayed the same. Partly because my interests drove me first to painting and cinema, partly for
the more down-to-earth reason that it takes up a lot of space, I almost never modelled anything that
was not meant to be shortly destroyed. CLAYFACES is a way for me to immortalize clay figures,
mere specimens amid the crowd of ephemeral beings I created, before they go back, quite litterally,
to the mud they came from.
From each model, only one picture is taken. That way, I do not think about it as a three-
dimensionnal figure, but as a two-dimensionnal composition, so that they end up looking as I want
from only one specific point of view. Once again, I look at my clay figures through a lens ; but this
time, they’re the only focus of attention.
My name is Adrien Picquenot, I am from France and I am currently living in Washington,
DC. I work in research, both by interest in my field, and because the relative freedom I have in
organizing my schedule allows me to devote myself in parallel to my other passions.
I have been painting and directing short films for most of my life, starting with clay
animation as a child, and the scope and ambition of my projects evolved as I grew up. In 2017, I
directed my first short film with professional resources : “Le Repas” is a two minute long stop
motion film, starring a real actress together with moving objects and clay figures. The actress and
the set were painted in reversed colors, and the film was then switched to negative : that way, the
colors seemed natural, but light and dark were inverted, creating an uncanny atmosphere. This short
film was shown in French festivals, and won regional and national student awards.
Since then, I have directed two music videos, both involving work with clay. In “Hacia El
Norte”, I designed and built puppets and small sets to recreate the nostalgic feeling of a children’s
cartoon, as if retrieved from a forgotten VHS in some dusty attic. The other one, “Angara”, was
directed within the framework of the Baïkal Symposium, an expedition to the Baïkal lake merging
arts and science , in which I took part. It featured classic clay animation, mixed with analog and
digital glitch effects to recreate moving abstract paintings, partly inspired by Russian
constructivism.
These recent projects reminded me how much I love working with clay, the texture and the
look of it. And the fact that I mainly used it for films made me paradoxically think of this
intrinsically three-dimensional medium as a two-dimensional one. Realizing that ignited the desire
to finally stop the flow of stop motion stills, and celebrate clay through a series of photographs.
Links :
Le Repas : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9eYxSIct38
Hacia El Norte : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooEz9BdxqOA