April 2024 - August 2024, Abbaye de Maubuisson, Saint-Ouen l’Aumône, France.

During my four-month art residency at the Abbaye de Maubuisson in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, I experienced this time as a solitary spiritual retreat, in the heart of a place steeped in history. This immersive experience profoundly transformed my practice and allowed me to ground my artistic research in a ritualized daily life, both contemplative and productive. At the start of the residency, I began by tracing the history of the abbesses who led the abbey between 1242 and the French Revolution. I wanted to understand their political and economic challenges in order to imagine what they might have felt in their daily lives. I discovered that these women led a surprisingly feminist existence for the time: they exercised political power, managed funds, held positions of responsibility, and lived longer, sheltered from certain diseases or the risks associated with childbirth. Alongside my readings on spiritual ecofeminism, I ultimately wanted to create work that traced and represented the way that these women’s histories lead us towards a collective memory of a community. In studying their stories, I strove to visually represent the relationship between these women, the connectivity between them via their spirituality, how they are linked through their own oral traditions.

The mood boards incorporate fragments of documentary and iconographic images drawn from personal research. Most of these sources were identified using the RENI database (managed by Lydie Brunetti).