Archiving emotions

Emotional archives I - Birds left as legacy, acrylic on paper, 2020

During the pandemic, stranded on his island of Noirmoutier in France, Clément Denis began to wonder about the disappearance of garden birds: their songs were becoming increasingly rare.

It was then that he decided to sublimate the anguish of the disappearance of birds from his daily life by starting an archive of endangered or threatened species. Like a herbarium, he patiently referenced around a hundred everyday birds using the databases of the French National Museum of Natural History. In the manner of his “woven lovebirds” from the series Confusion of feelings, he has tried to turn these birds into graphic imprints, so as to make them eternal in our collective memories.

His birds are a succession of prints that he sticks again and again onto canvas to create graphic fossils.

Birds left as legacy (2021-2023)