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

Terre Neuve / Terre Neuvas

(May, 2016) Please note:  I'm republishing this two years after I wrote the following post because a new version of this show is currently on view at the Musée de la Marine in Paris. 

The history of fishing is a long-haul story about using up the ocean. Even though the French Atlantic had been fished hard for centuries, it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that fishing became a year round, defining labor, rather than seasonal activity.  With depletion of coastal fish stocks, cod fishermen (especially from the north coast of Brittany) left for longer and more distant fishing seasons—to Iceland and Newfoundland. Terre Neuve / Terre Neuvas is a temporary exhibition that was jointly displayed by museums in Rennes and St. Brieuc, traveling in the summer of 2014 to Saint-Malo and Granville. The two museums display visual and material culture to tell the centuries-long story story of the French fishing fleet that traveled across the Atlantic to fish for cod. I visited in April, just before it closed at these locations.

"One Fish, Two Exhibitions" reads the promotional video:

Terre-Neuve / Terre-Neuvas : un poisson, deux expositions. from Les Champs Libres on Vimeo.

Both shows introduced the subject of the French fishing fleet in the North Atlantic through maps, prints, documents, models and objects.  The portion that was in Rennes in the vast, postmodern cultural center, the Champs Libres had a very strong focus on the objects and material culture of fishing (as you can see in the following images shot there). 

Salt cod.

Taxidermied codfish.

The portion at the much smaller St. Brieuc Art and History museum had a broad range of visual and material popular culture including Salon paintings, silent film, letters, diaries, maps, portraits, clothing, fishing gear, ex-voto paintings and votive boats. As in Rennes, historical film footage ran on many walls, surrounded by material witnesses.

Museum assistant director Aurélie Maguet gave an  hour-long tour, explaining the history of French fishing in the North Atlantic and the establishment of fishing bases in Newfoundland, especially on the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, which today are France's last bit of territory in North America.

Duhamel du Monceau, Traité général des pesches 1769-1782

The striking imagery from the two-volume treatise on fishing, by Enlightenment scientist and author Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1700-1782) Traité général des pesches, (published 1769-82) was used throughout the upper section of the exhibition, along with images, objects and video pertaining to cod fishing. Before the dramatic and dangerous life of the fisherman came to the fore in fin de siècle painting and popular culture, the fishing boat and the "colonial" site on the shore were understood as sites of  rational, routine labor.  

 Like other forms of trade over water, fishing moved people and resources. Duhamel's text shows how, as a materially intensive form of food hunting, fishing demanded a network of material and ecological actors: for instance, lines were made of horse hair, flax or hemp— floats were cork, bladders kept the nets floating,  and lead was used for sinkers. Images from this text were animated for the exhibition, as this hand-held clip demonstrates.

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The more official version of the film is here (updated June 2016)



La pêche sédentaire du 16ème au 19ème siècle à Terre-Neuve from Les Champs Libres on Vimeo.




Objects like this lure referred back to the practices depicted in the animation.

In the lower portion of the exhibition, Salon paintings such as Henri Dabadie's massive Departure of the Iceland Fishermen (a crowd-pleasing concoction of Impressionism, academic painting and japonisme) were framed by objects such as the sturdy leather and wood boots worn by Breton fishermen on these long journeys, sea chests, and wool long underwear that had been repeatedly mended, one would have to guess, during the many boring hours spent in transit. In her talk, Maguet made the point that melodramatic images such as this were not untruthful-- boats did depart and women did look melancholically to sea-- but that these images were already burned into the popular imagination by novels such as Pierre Loti's wildly successful Iceland Fishermen of 1886.

Henri Dabadie,  The Departure of the Iceland Fishermen in the Bay of Paimpol, 1900 (Nantes MBA)

A pair of many-times mended wool long underwear in the case beneath Dabadie's painting.

A similar pair was on display in Rennes, their affective power quite apparent!

Emma Herland's painting, Gaud Mevel, depicts the fictional character of Gaud, from Loti's Iceland Fishermen, who, goes daily to the village cemetery and the nearby chapel, expecting bad news of her husband's death at sea, obsessively reading the family names on plaques commemorating the lost at sea that repeat for several generations. In her daily, repetitive visits to this site of memory and mourning, the premonition seizes her that a new plaque will soon be added for her missing husband.

Emma Herland,  Gaud Mevel, 1887.  Musée de Laval.

Plaques for the disappeared at sea, Ploubazlanec, 2008.

  Editions of Loti's Iceland Fishermen and maquettes for sculptures based on his book.

To counter this mythic representation, Maguet explained, the curators installed a section containing letters, diaries, and other images and objects that served to give a voice to the fishermen and their families who are so often represented but silent.This included personal religious and devotional objects.

Two early ex-voto paintings expanded the visual culture of fisherfolk's religious practices.  The Exvoto of the miraculous salvation of the Pearl, from the Chapel of Notre Dame de la Cour in Lantic (North Coast, Brittany), a Gothic chapel that was the site of pilgrimage for sailors and fishermen of the region.

Ex voto of the Shipwreck of the Pearl, Notre dame de la Cour, Lantic, 1836

A votive boat that had been  carried in barefoot pilgrimages of thanks made by returned fishermen hung overhead, across from a painting by Rouen painter Albert Démarest, imaginatively constructing such a pilgrimage.

Albert Demarest, The Vow, 1894

The cod fishing boats departed from Paimpol in March, to make the month-long voyage across the ocean to fish the long summer season in the North Atlantic. These two journal covers, from March 1894 and March 1927, demonstrate the enduring interest in this dramatic moment in French popular culture.

Departure of the Iceland Fishermen, 1894

Departure of the Newfoundland Fishermen, 1927

Poster for the play "Terre-Neuve sur la Seine" by Eugène Le Mouël.  Pierreport, Paris. c. 1900  Musée du Vieux Granville.

The final part of the exhibition was a screenign room where a short version of  Jacques de Baroncelli's 1924 silent film adaptation of Loti's Iceland Fishermen played on a continuous loop.  The images in some of these stills clearly reflect the conventions established in painting and popular culture, such as the moment of departure:

 

Gaud waiting on the cliffs above the bay, looking to sea:

 

 There are several surreal interludes of ghosts on the surface of the ocean during a storm at sea:

And finally Gaud waits, at the "Widow's Cross" in Ploubazlanec.

  The success of these joint exhibitions is in the way that they represent what historian Jeffrey Bolster (in The Mortal Sea) terms “human maritime communities” as they interact with “marine biological communities."  They cast a critical eye on conventional representation, asking who can speak for this lost relationship with the sea, what voices can be recovered, or material experiences reimagined. 

 

indigo 2

PART 2: Island to Island: Indigo and Brittany in Blue Cultural Studies

Indigo manufacture, Central Carolina, from 'Le Costume Ancien et Moderne', Volume I, plate 51, by Jules Ferrario, published c.1820s-30s (colour litho)

There are many stories to tell about indigo. Nineteenth century work clothes tell one such tale.  Here are a few earlier stories about indigo and its material connection to Brittany.

Eighteenth century indigo production depended upon slave labor in the French colonies.




Indigo, as much as sugar or cotton, was a highly desired raw material that played an important part of the history of global trade on the Atlantic.  Its country of origin is uncertain, but Indigo was being grown in India and exported to the Roman Empire. 

The plant grows in hot climates-- it is a shrub that fixes nitrogen in poor soils.  To make dye from it, the leaves are fermented-- again this needs to happen in a very warm climate.

Indigo oxidation. My experiments with indigo dying use a pre-reduced kit.

  Fibers dyed in indigo come out of the dye vat a screaming chartreuse green, and miraculously turn blue in the open air. Repeated dipping and oxidizing produces the deepest blue.

Pieces of lace oxidizing. The pieces on the left have just been taken out of the dye bath. They will become as deep blue as the pieces on the right.

In the 18th century, indigo grown on plantations in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and in Lousiana, Florida and South Carolina brought a stunning amount of wealth to France.

 

Dried indigo dye compressed into rounds was shipped in barrels across the Atlantic to France, a raw material to feed the textile trade. 







 

'It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe" from Voltaire, Candide. 

Like sugar, the misery indigo caused for some and wealth it produced for others paid for rococo and neoclassical art, fashion and interior design. 

























This portrait of two named white women, their slave child, pug dog and exotic porcelain is a nightmare of early modern global trade that had already commodified  people and nature. I use this image in class to talk about the fetishism of people as things.  The students always understand the obscene parallels of boy and dog in this painting, so well articulated in Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum (1992) in which a recorded child's voice is heard coming from a painting that depicts a child slave, asking: "Am I your brother? Am I your friend? Am I your pet?"

Philippe Vignon, Portrait of King Louis XIV's  legitimized daughters by his mistress the marquise de Montespan. Francoise-Marie de Bourbon, Duchesse d'Orléans, 2nde Mademoiselle de Blois (1677-1749) and her sister (on the left) Louise-Francoise de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Nantes, Duchesse de Bourbon (1673-1743). c.1695.

The deep blue made by forced labor on one side of the Atlantic became the blue of peasant work clothes on the other. After the abolition of slavery, indigo production increased in colonial India.


Brittany had a textile industry that existed prior to the importation of cotton from the colonial Americas. From the 16th-18th centuries, linen and hemp was grown, spun and woven in pre-industrial Brittany: these fibers outfitted much of Europe's maritime fleet with sails and rope. Both crops were grown widely in the interior of Brittany, especially near the north coast and the area around Rennes.

 This map shows the areas in which linen (blue) hemp (green) or both (brown) were woven and the ports (red dots) that exported the textiles to Europe and the Americas.  The sculpted Enclos Paroisiaux of the 16th-18th centuries attest to the wealth that the textile trade brought to Brittany.

http://linchanvrebretagne.org/patrimoineethistoire.html

King Louis XIV effectively shut down this trade and destroyed the local economy with the eviction of many Breton Protestants – textile dealers and manufacturers (Rennes, Nantes and Vitré)– in the mass “brain drain” emigration that followed the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685.
 

From 1650 through the eighteenth century, Nantes, a major Breton city and seaport port (prior to the separation of the historical provinces of France in 1790) imported cotton, indigo and sugar from the French overseas colonies in the Americas. Nantes printed cotton (along with liquor, and ironware) was later used as currency in trade for enslaved Africans who were sent to work in the French overseas colonies. Nantes was the primary French port of the slave trade, followed distantly by Bordeaux and La Rochelle.

Nantes became famous for its printed "indiennes: cotton fabrics printed from intaglio-etched copper plates. Cotton and indigo were the stuff that made colonial images for global consumption.

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Télémaque dans la Grotte de Calypso, Detail.  Indigo Toile de Nantes,  c.1785.

The colonial pastoral fantasy of Paul et Virginie (Bernardin de Saint Pierre, 1788) is set on the Île de France (Mauritius):  two exiled French single mothers (one a Norman libertine aristocrat, the other Breton peasant who was seduced and abandoned) are aided by the slaves Marie and Domingue as they "live as creoles" and raise their  children as siblings. They fall in love as teenagers, unaware of the corruptions of the modern world; they are parted when Virginia (daughter of the aristocrat) is sent back to France to be educated, and she later dies in a shipwreck when returning to the island. Historian Megan Vaughan has shown that this fantasy relates to the social engineering of the French East India Company which had provided substantial monetary incentives for Breton peasant girls to emigrate to Mauritius, where, like many other overseas colonies (such as the seasonal fishing communities in St. Pierre and Miquelon in Newfoundland), there was a dearth of white brides. Breton women were recruited as yet another export commodity.


The story of Paul and Virginia was wildly popular as a mass-reproduced image in the decorative arts especially in the Toiles de Jouy luxury cotton fabrics produced in Nantes: textiles whose material existence depended upon colonial labor and materials.

One more story about Indigo: From one island to another.

Indigo truly can take its place in "blue cultural studies." 

There is something that I cannot stop imagining and I have only read about it in this text on shipwrecks.  Off the coast of Western Brittany, on the miniscule Ile de Sein that stands only a few feet above sea level, in December of 1739 the 300 ton ship the Ange Raphael (Angel Raphael) of Bordeaux wrecked on its return trip to France from Haiti (Saint Domingue). Twenty one were drowned. Bails of cotton and barrels of indigo came ashore as did 5,000 livres in silver and jewels. The islanders came to aid of the survivors, but they also pillaged the wreck. Were the shores of Sein awash in blue? Did sodden wads of cotton lie limply on the wrack line? Did the women of Sein make anything from these spoils, born of slave labor and hot sun, that had traveled the ocean to spill at their door?