Laurence Chellali
We are starting the beginning of 2017 with French photographer, who currently resides in China, Laurence Chellali. This new body of work addresses the fluctuating between multiple cultures, and finding new ways and their connections to old ones. Just as every spring new growth emerges from the all around much in the very same way, yet a very foreign and new feeling can be present. Her work embodies alluring aesthetics and surreal ambiences. Below you can read her bio and artist statement. Visit her website for more work and a blog for tutorials and workshops.
CROSSING, SO CHERRY-BLOSSOM SHADOWS EASTWARD
It is springtime. Like every year, as nature is spreading out, I admire the vital force that emerges from the ground. I can feel and understand my link to the cycle of life. Imperiously, this vital breath leads me and imposes its mystery.
But this time, the magic does not operate as usual. As I observe the garden, it seems to elude me, shunning any definition, its contours dissolving as I try to grasp its direction, its order. I fully recognize – I recall – the vegetal essences, even though I feel I am in a remote, unfamiliar place. I am confronted with another way of representing nature’s expanse, but I am not certain to what extent.
I discover a new kind of springtime, a beguiling inspiration. I have arrived in China.
To express this vision, I drew on the organic shapes of jade stones, on jewels and fans that bring Asia to mind. They allow for both a break and continuity between what is familiar to me and what is enigmatic, between the defined and the undefined. Through their glowing contours they allow me to show life’s emergence.
These photographs encapsulate this mystery, the oscillation and the swaying back and forth between two cultures. A momentary suspension of borders. to and fro between here and elsewhere, connection to the vital principle, they tell of this journey.
Title inspired by a Yosa Buson poem :
月光西にわたれば花影東に歩むかな
Biography
1967 : Borned in Lyon, in France 2006 : Transfer in Italy, at Genova 2015 : transfer to Nankin, in China
My very first photographic experience goes back while I worked as journalist for a French regional daily newspaper. The technologies evolving, I was brought to draft texts for websites and it is rather naturally that my taste for the design and the image made me slide towards Web design’s job. Since a few years, I rediscovered the photography and this one imposed upon me in a new light: the camera will be the instrument with which I’ll can express my vision of the world.
Through my daily environment, the events of my life and my existential questions, I ask the world and I look from my real-life experience for a testimony of the deep value of the human being, the revelation of its doubts, its weaknesses, its dreams, its passions.
In this sense my photography is poetry and it tries to establish between the reader and me an emotional dialogue, it wants to lead the spectator thanks to the invention of visual meaning forms which lean on the mystery of the photographic illusion and its technique.
Since 3 years I have decided to make public my work, first of all by taking part in collective exhibitions then last year by participating in competitions organized by American and Italian art galleries. My photos are present in private collections. Besides, I liven up a blog (www.photofolle.net) where I speak about photographic creation. I give courses – workshops, photographic coaching and on-line courses – of photography in France and in Italy.
All Images © Laurence Chellali
