Silvana Mc Nulty: Déborder De Ses Bords

Silvana Mc Nulty’s works focuses on matter and materials. She tries to understand the internal structure of materials, as well as the qualities specific to each of them. To do so, she turns into an explorer. Exploring is turning around something, crossing a space in all its dimensions, getting lost in it and finding oneself in it again. Therefore she plucks, she shells, she pierces… She tries to create blurriness, to express a contradiction by confronting, in the same object, atmospheres, textures, forms and gestures that are a priori incompatible. Often, the intrinsic fragility of the material is offset by the power of the gesture. Fragility pushed to its absolute limit creates a feeling of a permanent threat, that of a collapse.

Her method makes it possible for her to work in a daily, regular and spontaneous way, with a strong experimental dimension. The scale of the hand is of particular interest to her, for the intimacy that it arouses, but also the autonomy and independence that it allows. She consequently creates fragments, bits, pieces that, like a puzzle, are fully deployed in the space thus becoming a work of art through their confrontation, accumulation or overlapping. Weaving and intertwining techniques permit her to create a space that is contained in itself and can simultaneously be part of a whole. These natural or artificial heteroclite assemblages confront each other and are blended together, creating a supple, mobile and unstable hybrid object. The moving, protean, even “shapeless” material can be adapted to the space or the body with which it enters in contact.

Silvana McNulty apprehends the landscape of the shore as a metaphor of her work. She creates a shore that is in perpetual movement, a blurred border between land and sea, liquid and solid. Subject to the action of waves and tides, erosion and sedimentation, the ravages of pollution, the shore is a great mixer that links distinct and antithetical elements into a compact, unstable and moving mass.