Maud Gourdon

Maud Gourdon practice comes from a background in line drawing and illustration but for several years now text and language has become the dominant part of her work - generating and working with text and word play across the different languages which surround her in her daily life. Over the past few years, her practice has evolved from a fascination for language as an inexhaustible material of transmutation — from the spoken word to its graphic representation, subsequent readings and potential meanings — to a reflection on using language for creating visual and spatial narratives. These narratives take the form of installations composed of publications, texts, drawings and sculptures.

Gourdon's clear-line drawings, drawn in the style of popular images such as comic strips, illuminated manuscript, decorative patterns, logotypes and explanatory schemes, can be read very easily but always convey a certain unease. The images slide with humor and lightness from one meaning to another, forever held in tension between different interpretations. She explores this space of ambiguity and immiscibility in order to develop new narrative strategies.

Gourdon applies a similar process to spoken and written language. She likes to play with the confusion and collision of sounds and meanings — which harbor her fascination for language — in order to generate idiosyncratic universes.

Conceptually, Gourdon's installations always result from intimate stories and objects that she wraps into wordplay, line-play and multiple forms. Her investigation is coursing through history and traditions searching for possible connections — through analogy, homophony, homography, coincidence, slip of the pen or tongue — in order to gather materials to create present day fictions. This way to draw connections is for her a model of story telling.