Artchipel

ARTchipel Artist

MaÏssa Toulet | MaÏssa Toulet on ARTchipel.com (b.1974, France) - Cabinet de sorcellerie

• Tell us in few words about you.
I am born in Paris where I currently live. I would say that in my work, I practice the assembly, in various forms (combinations of objects, images, words). I like to create mismatches and connections between elements that are a priori disparate.

• What motivated you to become an artist?
The need to give a concrete form to the images or the ideas that occupied my head and which had no reason to interest anyone else but me.

• What are your work process and techniques?
Most of the time, I work from existing elements. Objects that I collect, the images that I cut… Then I transform them and try to make them work together to produce something meaningful. My techniques are quite various but not very sophisticated: I cut, I paste, I sand, I saw, I drill, I paint, I model, I mold, I sew… I do not really control any of these techniques, but I have used them all at some time or another.

• Tell us a bit about your work habits.
A table, objects, pictures, magazines, books, and the disorder, a lot of disorder. I usually do not have to create it, it just happens after a few hours.

• What inspires and provokes imagination in you?
The objects that I find most of the time, the images that I cut, the phrases… and also artwork that I see, often the religious and popular art, museums of natural science, ritual objects, vernacular (class notebooks, intimate photos, letters….)

• Does your work reflect your person?
Of my inner life, certainly, but they do not necessarily correspond to the image I give of myself in life. Actually, I do not know after all.

• The word you prefer?
I don’t love a word more than another (like I don’t prefer a specific color). It depends on the context, with which other words that we assemble a word.

(interview with artist by ARTchipel Nov-2011)

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