Gaëlle Leenhardt: Calcaires lutétiens

Cocotte Paris presents Calcaires lutétiens a project by artist Gaëlle Leenhardt. Leenhardt transforms oyster shells collected from the quarries of Paris into sculptural installations. Bound with natural lime and inspired by the Roman opus incertum, she creates mosaics of varied shapes and colours. These adorn basins hung on walls or built on the ground, evoking canopic jars or primitive stoups. Over time, the lime and shells will blend with the soil, forming a new layer of shelly limestone, a future enigma for archaeologists.

The quarries, part of the Lutetian limestone bedrock of the Paris Basin, have supplied building material since antiquity. Beneath Paris lies a vast network of tunnels, their ceilings studded with fossilised cerites—tiny shells deposited millions of years ago. A similar geological layer exists in the Cairo Basin, providing the stone for the Giza pyramids.

As Lutetia transitioned to Paris under the Roman Empire, 17th-century scholars speculated the name referred to the Egyptian goddess Isis, interpreting “per/par” as “house” in ancient Egyptian. This led to myths of Paris as the “house of Isis,” with claims that Notre Dame was built on a temple to her. Such ideas flourished in the 19th-century Egyptomania.

Egyptian mythology further links to Paris’s history through Osiris, dismembered by his enemies and reassembled by Isis to create the first mummy. Similarly, the Paris quarries, closed in the 18th century for safety, became ossuaries, receiving human remains from overcrowded cemeteries. Soil brought to these tunnels contains artifacts of past lives—belt buckles, coins, animal bones, and oyster shells—a fitting origin for Leenhardt’s layered works.