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60
Les Prairies's artists
HELEN MIRRA
Hourly Directional Field Notation, Arizonan Sonoran Desert, 6 January, 2012, 2012.
Photography of the artist. Courtesy of the artist and galery Nelson-Freeman, Paris.
Co-production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
Frac Bretagne.
Avec le soutien des Verrières –
résidences-ateliers de Pont-Aven et
d'Itinéraire Bis – Galerie du Dourven.
Walking is an integral part of Helen Mirra's method of production. It structures her choice of
process. The works realised for Les Prairies result from a process begun in 2010 which she
has used from exhibition to exhibition and from country to country, the idea being that at
each exhibition the fruits of an earlier residence elsewhere are displayed while she works
on new stuff while in residence. Thus, from one exhibition to another a nomadic oeuvre
gets created indirectly, with titles such as Field Recordings and Field Notation that reflect
her outdoor habits. The works displayed at Rennes were produced in the winter of 2012
in Arizona; those that she has produced in Brittany during the summer of 2012, between
Brocéliande, Pont-Aven and Trédrez-Locquémeau, will be presented in Tokyo. Hourly
Directional Field Notation, Arizonan Sonoran Desert are the fruit of a week's walking in
the Sonoran Desert after the manner of the early American pioneers. On every one of her
daily perambulations Helen Mirra made a print on the way. She would cover a stone she
found on the ground with green ink and apply it to a length of raw linen which she kept in
her back-pack, folded like a map. This direct 'positive' print method recalls the Japanese
pictorial technique known as gyotaku, which consists of covering a freshly caught fish
with ink in order to make a realistic rubbing of it. Mirra's marks are "neither photographic
nor descriptive", making it impossible to pin them down geographically. They are pure
materiality, translating the reciprocal imprint left by the artist on the landscape and by the
landscape on the artist.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1970 in New York (United States), lives and works in Cambridge
(United States).