spatial light installation
Elise Morin is a French artist working with waste material, creating installations set in specific locations and then modified to conjure new three-dimensional landscapes. These visually attractive projects have a strong ecological undertone. Water carrier, a unique site-specific installation created for our White Night only, will transform mill race into a poetic country, connecting the worlds of nature and science. Through the interplay of dream, water, light and space, Elise’s creation will reveal another dimension of this place, lending it an unforgettable atmosphere. The largest and most complex project so far presented during White Night in Košice and built exclusively by local craftsmen, is the result of a year’s work and long discussions between the artist and the curator.
Water is the source of all the life on Earth. From times immemorial it has been present in every myth and in all cultures. It is fascinating how constant it remains, always having the same composition that connects, disintegrates and regenerates, connecting all the living organisms, plants and bodies, in a single common past. This strong symbolic value transforms water into magical material, fascinating and scary at the same time. Climatic changes, ecological and human disasters bring up associations of biblical flood, long lost worlds, thirst and tears. Pure water from streams, fountains, rivers, mysterious ponds and lakes or the fascinating and worrying waters of the seas have for centuries inspired calm expression and dramatic accents in the depiction of nature and in illustration accompanying myths. This installation builds on this understanding of water as a mere background scenery that has lost its original idea and takes an ironic point of view, focusing of the a priori pragmatic relationship between widely used material and tamed, enslaved water. Water trapped in sewages systems, bottles, artificial streams, fish tanks and swimming pools – all these are just poor models of the vastness of the seas, acting as mirrors and appeasing the narcissism of their owners. Water carrier shows a complex approach combining ordinariness and imagination. It is a potential avatar, a ‘water carrier’, repetitive image it implicitly presents and a prosaic fountain.
Elise Morin was born in Paris in 1978 and studied at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, St Martin’s College in London and Tokyo University of the Arts. She is the author of many projects in fine arts, scenography and design and has exhibited at prestigious institutions in Europe, Japan, China and Australia.