Q: You have stated that “my work comes into being in the space where science fact and science fiction meet and merge.” Please elaborate on that.
A: The work at its simplest level is about nature and the imagination and therefore I’m profoundly influenced by the Romantic tradition on the one hand and, perhaps paradoxically, by science on the other. When I started I was living in a very wild, remote rural region of France and I wanted to engage artistically with that environment. But the scale of nature is so vast and overwhelming with so much variety and detail that it was difficult to know where to start. Moreover today, thanks to science and scientific imaging technologies such as satellites or electron micrographs, we can access images of nature at every level of scale, from cell structures to galaxies in formation, adding to our knowledge but also to our confusion. Pouring over this vast quantity of visual data I began to make sense of it by identifying patterns and repeated motifs that exist in nature in different contexts and at different scales. I developed a repertoire, or rather a taxonomy, of different patterns that I then used to construct wholly imaginary organisms. This is important to me; I believe the role of the artist is to transform reality not merely to imitate or transcribe it; I solicit the recognition of the viewer but withhold it by making works that are visually ambiguous by making multiple visual references simultaneously: cell structures, microbes, marine algae, coral, vegetal forms, cloud formations, topographical maps, the body’s organs, and orifices, etc. The ultimate aim is to get people to stop, look, observe and see the beauty, intricacy, diversity and fragility of the natural world that surrounds them.

“different scales” = different levels of physical scale, going from microscopic to macroscopic; for example, a spiral structure can be seen in the formation of a galaxy as well as a snail’s shell.