Nadège Mériau’s experimental practice is principally photographic, combining camera-less, analogue and digital processes, but also encompassing sculptural installations and video work. Best known for her use of organic matter – bread, chicken carcasses, honeycomb – her visceral and sensuous imagery both seduces and disorientates. Spaces are ambiguous and scale is distorted. For each piece Mériau exercises both control and restraint, manipulating and coaxing her materials into certain behaviours or forms, whilst simultaneously allowing nature to take its course.
https://vimeo.com/468160106/b2d9bc61c4
Interested in making our experience of the digital and photographic more embodied, Nadège Mériau brings her apparatus – camera, photosensitive paper or flatbed scanner – close to natural organisms. In doing so, she draws the viewer into an immediate and sensory encounter with the subject of their scrutiny. Yet, with closeness distance often occurs and things are seen anew, be it lichen on a concrete wall (In These Times, 2020 ), the underbelly of snails (The Fall) or traces of fish skins on a baking tray (They Who Eat My Flesh).These works, here presented by the artist, not only explore the sense of touch but our sense of belonging and disconnection, to and from one another, our environment and all that is beyond human.
Nadège Mériau is a French artist based in London. She completed an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries and the Conran Award in 2011, nominated for the Arts Foundation Fellowship and the Arles Discovery Award in 2012 and the Prix Pictet 2014. Recent exhibitions include Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art 1692-2019, RWA Bristol, Auto//Fiction, Exhibition and Symposium, Dyson Gallery, Royal College of Art, London and 209 Women at Portcullis House, Houses of Parliament and Impressions Gallery, Bradford.