36° 09’ N    13° 15 E   2025

A Place And A Connexion   51° 02′ 10″ N 7° 01′ 59″ E, Kunstverein Leverkusen Schloss Morsbroich, Germany (2025) — Oriental paper, acrylic, silk armed with wire, embroidery armed with wire, videoprojections — Dimensions : 270 x 430 cm

How do connections to a place arise, what are they based on? The two French-Canadian artists Michelle Héon and Gilles Morissette have explored this question for their installations at the Kunstverein Leverkusen.

[…]Landscape and nature - alongside and in close connection with migration - are also a central theme for Michelle Héon, who has also dedicated herself to them for years in her site-specific installations made of paper and fabric, which also incorporate memories, history and social references. “They place the viewer at the center of a poetic or dramatic story,” says the artist. The encounter is contemplative, the situation eventful.”

For the Kunstverein, “I wanted a water map on the wall, without elevations, simply with creases, folds and color nuances within the dark, deep blue to the white of whitecaps, as a background for projections of water in motion and of boats driven back and forth by the play of the wind on a calm water surface, without a clear direction.” She has therefore decidedly dispensed with the drawing and inscription of routes and landmarks, achieving structure primarily by applying very thin paint to the paper. “I used water to formulate the movement of water.” However, the fact that this work extends in front of us on the wall and not on the floor means that the reading jumps between water and cave. Only in the areas where the projections meet the paper surface, rock formations surrounded by water appear to interrupt the uneven surface.

Héon describes her work with maps as a “research project”, for which she initially developed smaller formats seen from an aerial perspective, painted on both sides with very fluid acrylic paint to give the paper an object-like quality. Later, she felt the need to add waterways in the form of embroidery made of thread and wire - alluding to this system developed by us humans to conquer the ultimately unfathomable vastness and depth of the sea. In her new, 14 meter long work at the Kunstverein, however, this linear vein work seems largely dissolved; the scraps of fabric floating lost on the surface, dark-colored, full of holes, make us reluctant to ask about their origin.

The Canadian artist also mounts a larger piece of such tattered fabric in the front room on a blue background, lighter this time and yet no less threatening. This installation of silk fabric, colored black and dark reddish brown, on paper reminiscent of water once again draws us into a whole spiral of associations and images - similar to those evoked by waves and boats in the back room.

With “A place and a connection”, Michelle Héon and Gilles Morissette have created a ‘real place for the imagination, for the questioning of human destiny and survival, for the utopia and reality of a world of migration’ and a nature that is becoming more fragile and at the same time more uncontrollable, as was once said about a work by Héon.

Susanne Wedewer-Pampus
March 2025