Cecile Borne: Tideline Gleaner (part one)

Cécile Borne finds her subject matter and materials on the tide line. She is a multi media artist based in Douarnenez, Brittany. Like the gleaner who was so often painted or photographed picking the remains of a wreck, gathering mussels, kelp or flint stones on the French North Atlantic shores, she finds her materials on the intertidal zone. But unlike seaweed that has been gathered from these beaches for centuries, this fabric is unmoored, never having had a holdfast—an alien resident of the water, not bound to a zone, but subject to the tides and wind. She calls her self a plasticienne chiffonnière: a rag sculptor.

Douarnenez is a port town of many contrasts, from its past as both an industrial fish cannery and an artist colony, to its present as a town of artists and summer visitors in the aftermath of fishing. In installations of the past several years, materials gathered on the strand assume new forms. As part of her practice, she walks the Bay of Douarnenez, searching out unlikely material: textiles that the sea has thrown back on the land. This stretch of coastline was the site of her adolescence—it is a place intimately known. When collecting in the summer, she often swims or dances on the strand. This is a fully embodied practice-- hardly a coincidence as Bourne studied contemporary dance in London and Paris. Her practices of walking, salvaging, recuperation and installation are all bound together in an ecological immersion in place.

Inlets or criques along this bay each have their own particular beach—one made of round stones, the next sand and slate fragments, another flat strand. Many small streams course down through villages, farmland and woodland to the sand, mixing fresh with sea water. Favorite criques are those that best trap old cloth. Some textile bits were old-fashioned sardine boat sails that have been in the sea for years, others are fragmentary, waxed garments formerly worn by fishermen or sailors. Occasionally she finds pieces of household linens or even costumes discarded after Mardi Gras. Other textiles are hard to identify: some were used as rags on boats and then discarded. Some are just lost or slip overboard. The sand often buries things that come ashore; when they spend time under it, they are marked by its minerals and organic matter.  These imprinted fragments are later found only by attentiveness to the smallest visible edges. Although the Bay of Douarnenez opens to the Iroise, the North Atlantic and, of course, to the global ocean, most of the textiles that wash up have local origins (such as rags that bear the mark of a hospital laundry service in nearby Vannes).

walking the bay

Mixed seaweed and debris on the wrack line

So much human generated debris is snared, reeled in or caught in the rocks and tide pools, or buried in the sand above the tide—scattered in pebbles, entangled in dried kelp. Few people notice the amount of textile waste on the beach. Often it has taken on the color of sand and, like plastic, it breaks down into ever smaller parts.

Material gleaned from one walk

There are fabrics she does not take such as socks, sneaker innersoles, or the remains of an entire container of hotel slippers that went into the bay and, for a time, washed up across the bay. Until recently, she was uninterested in the ubiquitous plastic that, unlike organic textiles, cannot quickly return to matter; it only gets smaller and more imbedded in the seaweed, more fragmentary in the tide pools.

Dentelles, or sea-lace

Borne collects, rinses, and orders her marine fabrics. Her studio serves as an archive, storehouse or sorting zone for her recuperated, and potentially restored finds. This is not exactly a process of recycling—rather it is a form of forensic restitution that permits the material to tell stories of the bodies that once wore it.

a fragment of waxed clothing

A black piece of fabric, when held up to the light, has ripples etched into it: she says that the sea often leaves marks of its movement. She tells me stories she has gleaned from her finds: over the course of a few winters of walking the bay, she gradually reassembled a 12-piece set of damask table napkins. All had the same pattern in the weave, yet were marked very differently by the sea, who acted on them, while submerged, like a master printmaker. She had not found any others at all like this: they must have come from the same source. She speculates that this singular set-- perhaps no longer new-- might have been passed down in the family of a fisherman who used them as rags on his boat and, one by one, they were thrown or fell into the sea, and made their way to shore all along the bay. A shirt with a pattern of sailboats was torn in half, used for some dirty job, then discarded. The two pieces washed up in utterly different sites, and, as unlikely as it might be, Borne found them and made them almost whole. A garment with no value in the world becomes an uncanny found object; its two halves utterly marked by their separation and remaking in the sea.

reunited pieces of a long-separated shirt, printed with sail boat pattern.

Her forensic research opens up untold narratives: finding the name of a child in a raincoat revealed an entire family history: triangulating the coat size (8 years), she determined that it had been in the sea for about 4 years. In reconstructing its story, she was led back, almost impossibly, to a psychoanalyst who had been one of her patrons. In another exceptional find, a stained Tyvek suit (likely discarded after Mardi Gras in Douarnenez) bore the name “LATEUSE.” When googled, its former owner was revealed to be a boastful local man who liked fast cars. Borne took apart the suit, stretching pieces that bore the imprint of his buttocks, knees and elbows. They became uncanny prints, a sort of Veronica veil or true icon of his body.

"Mu(e)s" installed in Saint-Merry, 2014. 

Another singular fragment is a red butcher's work-coat, that had been saturated at some point, in blue marine paint. Transformed through this unlikely process, and almost impossible to recreate, it became part of an installation "Mu(e)s" in Paris at the church of Saint-Merry in 2014.

"Mu(e)s" installed in Saint-Merry, 2014.

Suspended in mid air, the sea-marked textiles, now clean and stiffened, float as if votive offerings from the sea, relics of past lives, animated in an unfamiliar setting. Many Breton chapels are filled with votive offerings that give thanks for salvation and with cenotaphs that commemorate and mourn the lost at sea.

Interview de Cécile Borne from www.saintmerry.org on Vimeo.

In her exhibition "Vestiaires, cirés-récits" at the Port Musée in Douarnenez in 2015, Borne made found maritime clothing come to life, to speak as a second skin. The cracked surface of the ruined waxed garments were first marked by wear, then by what the sea, the sand and the sun did to them.

There is a powerful sense of mourning and absence in the installation: many of the brown, waxed garments are no longer common. Were they discarded by their owners, or do they speak of drowning?   Yellow fishing gear has aged or been stained olive or black. Some pieces, wracked up on rocks, or dug down into sand, became the substrate for algae and crustaceons. As organic matter grew, a once functional garment became abstracted by the agency of the sea.

Her installation of 2016, Disparition, is an homage to migrants lost at sea that took loss and mourning to a much wider scale. The presence of bodies, drowned in desperate attempts to find shelter and safety in Europe, are evoked in casts of torsos that float above collections of archived textiles. Mourning these victims of war and the cruelty of closed borders, the Breton culture of maritime votive objects assumes meaning for the global oceans.

Disparition

Here the sea definitively becomes a site of mourning. The installation laments the lost at sea, and, by extension, the emptying of the sea of all its vibrant life.

Portrait of Cécile Borne by Nedjma Berder