Myriam Hornard
Born in Athus, Myriam Hornard currently lives in Brussels and Virton. After studying languages, she joined Jean Glibert’s studio at La Cambre. As a teenager, she began making installations, and soon turned to textile work, including paper architectures, various works based on photographic transfers on fabric and, more recently, a collection of antique canvases depicting women’s occupational work, and portraits of masters based on old paintings.
In 2013, Myriam Hornard turned to molding to create sculptures in reclaimed cult wax. Invested with a heating system that allows them to soften to the point of collapse, this process enables performative exhibitions in which the sculptures constantly change shape and end up being replaced and recycled thanks to the casting process. Videos highlighting impermanence and constant metamorphosis accompany these installations. Curtains, hangings, gathered or pleated fabrics are a recurrent element in his installations. It represents light and shadow, alternation, suggesting that these gathers and pleats are always hiding something, starting with half of himself. A video projection on an ecru cotton curtain can also underline the floating, uncertain side of human reality and its mystery.
“The strange presence of the absent” is a recurring theme in Myriam Hornard’s work. IN 2021, painting inspired by extracts from 17th-century paintings, mainly the neck, collar and hands of characters, becomes a research project in its own right. The neck, the fragile yet resistant part that links the body to the mind and connects the whole being, as a metaphor for wholeness. These very small-format oil paintings on wood or canvas once again enable us to engage in a dialogue with an artist who has disappeared and is therefore physically present.
From 2023 onwards, oil painting on wood and molded plaster after pieces of furniture with details of children’s clothing is a new subject of study.
In keeping with the theme of the continual transformation of beings, childhood is a particularly interesting period, and the clothes that accompany this period of life like successive skins…