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

Shore Birds: feathers, fashion and trash

"... all creatures of tidal rocks are hidden from view, but the gulls know what is there, and they know that in time the water will fall away again and give them entrance to the strip between the tide lines."

Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea

Penguilly l’Haridon, The Little Gulls, Belle Ile (1858, Rennes Museum of Fine Arts)  

A remarkable painting, The Little Gulls, Belle Ile (1858) by Octave Penguilly l’Haridon depicts an un-peopled, rocky inlet on the Breton island of Belle Île. Charles Baudelaire remarked, upon seeing it at the Salon of 1859, that the rocks make "a portal open to infinity.” And he marveled over the “wound of white birds, and the solitude!”


In this uncanny landscape, a colony of gulls move as if with one mind, streaming through the rocks and keeping to a sunlit section of the strand. Protected in this spot from waves and wind, and knowing where and when to look, the birds gather at the edge of a lively tidal pool revealed by the receding tide.



On this unpeopled beach in Penguilly’s painting, there is an oscillation between extremes of scale: from the large, implacable rocks, to the darting, tiny movements of detail in the birds that momentarily adorn them, almost mistakable for drifted snow or blooming flowers. In this marginal space, where the rocks act as sun dials, showing the time of day, the slow geologic time of the granite meets the fleeting seasons of a shore bird and the diurnal tide.


Seeing this painting in Rennes set me thinking about images of seagulls and our relationship to them.

Silver Gulls, illustration from Le Monde de la Mer, 1866.

The sea gull is a much maligned animal today, often thought of as a "trash" animal, or a "flying rat" -- much like pigeons, raccoons and squirrels, gulls are canny creatures who have proliferated on a diet gleaned from the mountains of waste generated by consumer societies.

Félix Braquemond, Seagulls, 1888 etching

But can we see the nineteenth-century seagull free of our own trash? In the etching by Braquemond or the studies of motion by Marey, this is a vibrant, powerful creature, soaring through the air on its powerful wings.

Jules-Etienne Marey, Flight of a Seagull, 1887, chronophotograph.

Marey, Flight of a Seagull, 1887, bronze. Musée Marey et des Beaux-Arts, Beaune.

In paintings of dead seagulls by Jules Breton and Gustave Courbet, the birds are not disgusting or filthy. Breton, depicting one of his favorite peasant-models from Douarnenez, Marguerite Moreau, imagines a peasant’s compassion for a wounded sea-bird. As a woman of the coast, Moreau, with her dark hair and strong, working arms seems a powerful female force, allied to coastal nature. The tips of her penn-sardin coiffe (the local costume) are caught by the wind, mimicking the wings of the creature in her arms and the one who flies above the sea behind her.

 Breton, The Wounded Gull, 1878 (left). Courbet, Girl with Gulls (Beachcomber's Daughter) 1865 (right).

Courbet described his painting as “an impression of the sea shore at Trouville, [with] the daughter of a beachcomber." He creates sensual contrasts of the girl's lush and untamed hair with the hanging deadness of the birds, swinging from a stick. Their outstretched wings mirror each other, in dead symmetry, almost creating a monstrous triad of parts. Did she find them in her beachcombing or stone them on the shore?


  In 1865, Courbet painted a portrait of the Hungarian Countess Karoly at the beach resort of Trouville, Normandy. She is seated at the seashore, wearing a hat plumed with ostrich or egret feathers.



Seeing these two paintings side by side puts me in mind again of what John Berger wrote about Courbet in the 1970s, that the materiality of his works insisted on expressing
 “a large part of what exists” that served to “challenge the chosen ignorance of the cultured.” 

Hair, ever the emblem of feminine beauty, is here in contrast with animal plumage.  The countess's carefully coiffed locks are topped with a carefully selected feathers, while the wild blond mane of the Norman beachcomber are so very close to the feathers of the gulls that still cling to their animal forms. Class and closeness to the animal emerge from this pairing of paintings from the beach at Trouville in 1865.

But why collect dead seagulls? In just about 1865 the  female consumer craze for feathered hats had begun. By, 1900 plumage hunters had exterminated many species of birds worldwide.

Danish painter Anna Archer, who was a native of the artists colony at Skagen and often painted the lives of fisherpeople, in 1883 depicted an elderly couple in a dim interior filling a basket with the plucked feathers of seagulls. This is likely related to millner's demand for bird feathers. By the 1890s, gulls wings, and even entire taxidermied birds were common on women's hats.

Anna Archer,  Plucking Seagulls. Lars Gaihede and old Lene. 1883. Hamburg.

Hat with an entire dead shore bird.

A Swan and Dove hat, c. 1905.

Birds were trapped for the cage trade and limed, shot, bludgeoned or poisoned by the thousands of underemployed rural poor who provided raw materials for the milliner. Few species were spared the unwelcome attentions of the plumage hunters. Seabirds were especially in demand, and populations of gulls and kittiwakes were decimated to sustain the fashion for birds’ wings in women’s hats. As London and provincial dealers offered one shilling each for the wings of ‘white gulls’ in the 1860s, excursion trains left London for locations as far apart as Flamborough Head and the Isle of Wight carrying beer-swilling plumage hunters and their rook rifles towards the killing grounds. Some hunters abandoned any notion of ‘sport’ and contrived to catch gulls and kittiwakes on their nests. Subsequently, as one observer put it, ‘cutting their wings off and flinging the victim into the sea, to struggle with feet and head until death came slowly to their relief.’

R. J. Moore-Colyer ‘Feathered Women and Persecuted Birds’ (2000)


Outcry against this practice and the nascent conservation movement of the 1910s came too late for some species. The bobbed hairdos of the 1920s finally did in the vogue for embellished hats.


From fashion adornment to flying rat, gulls and other shore birds have not escaped the clutches of modern consumption and waste.

Chris Jordan's film Midway (2014), filmed on the remote island, documents the death of tens of thousands of albatrosses, killed by ingesting plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch. We still need to insistence on expressing “a large part of what exists” to “challenge the chosen ignorance of the cultured.”

MIDWAY a Message from the Gyre : a short film by Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.