Meet-up Bretagne 2024

Initiated in 2015 by Documents d'artistes Paca in Marseille area, Meet-up studio visits programm has been enlarged to other region where Documents d'artistes associations are etablished.
Meet-up consists at studio visits and meetings between artists and professionals issued from the artistic field. Because it stimulates the exposure of artists and their output at a national and international level, as well as fostering both bonds of mutual familiarity among art professionals, Meet-up is a unique opportunity for discoverying regional art scenes.

This international session is organised with Documents d'artistes Bretagne, with the support of Région Bretagne (b-monde programm), Visual Arts Group Wales (VAGW) and Artes Mundi.

Independant curator and art critic based in le Havre, France

Julie Crenn holds a doctorate in art history and is an art critic (a member of the AICA), and an independent exhibition curator. In 2005, she obtained a Master’s in Historical Research and Art Criticism from Université Rennes 2; the work of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was the subject of her thesis. As part of her research into feminist and postcolonial practices, she was given the title of Doctor of Arts (history and theory) by the Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux III. Her thesis focused on contemporary textile practices and artistic works that highlight the theme of memory, history, gender, and cultural and sexual identities.

Since 2018, Julie Crenn has been artistic director of the residence Les Ateliers des Arques in the Lot (France). She has been member (2014–2020) of the FRAC Poitou-Charentes (France) technical acquisition committee anD actually member of Technical acquisition committee of FRAC REUNION (2021-2024). She has organised a number of exhibition projects in France (in Paris, Caen, Rochechouart, Clermont Ferrand, Bourges, Tarbes, Bordeaux), in Indian Ocean (Réunion Island, Mauritius), and Saint-Denis de La Réunion), in Belgium (Brussels and Ghent), and in Germany (Leipzig).

Visual Arts Manager and curator at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth, Wales

Ffion Rhys studied Fine Art at Falmouth College of Arts and has worked for over 16 years in the field of gallery education and curation. She worked as Assistant Curator with Artes Mundi, the international visual arts exhibition and prize based in Cardiff, Wales. What has driven her throughout her career is seeing at first hand how art can enrich and transform people’s lives, and she believes that this should be an entitlement for all.

Curatorial interest

I have an interest in art and ways of working that give a platform for, and discussion on :
Minority voices
Art as action
Co-curation with communities
Identity
Materiality
Science and art 

Artist and director of Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, Wales

After studying in Farnham and Manchester in the 1980s and 90s, he produced t-shirt designs and worked for galleries including Tate, Whitworth, Walker Art Gallery. He has exhibited internationally. After establishing The Regional Print Centre, he worked for Arts Council England before developing the concept for Tŷ Pawb in Wrexham. After a brief spell as Curator at Aberystwyth Arts Centre he became Director of Oriel Davies in 2017.

Curatorial interest

At Oriel Davies Gallery, we are interested in sense of place, the global in the local “glocal”. We’re interested in rural, isolation, agriculture, nature.
Equality, diversity and inclusion, lgbtqia+, sanctuary (Syrian, Afghani, Kurdish, Ukrainian, migrants)
Intersectionality.
Community and society.
Health and wellbeing.
Craft skills / making.
Climate and sustainability, future.
Language (bilingualism English/ Cymraeg (Welsh).
fy milltir sgwar/ my square mile
Rivers
Farming
Alternative lifestyles
Textiles / weaving
Lichens and mosses
Science and nature
Political activism (born to be mild)
Friendship
Sound works
Walking practice 
Performance / meditation 
Film and photography

Director of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Dublin, Ireland

She has an MA in Curatorial Studies from Goldsmiths College London and a BA from Trinity College Dublin in Art History and Sociology.  She has worked for many years in the arts as an independent curator and was a former Visual Arts Advisor to Arts Council Ireland. In 2022 she was part of the curatorial team for Niamh O’ Malley’s Gather, representing Ireland at the 59th Biennale di Venezia. With TBG+S, she is currently part of the curatorial team undertaking two major off-site exhibitions at Dublin Port, Longest Way Round, Shortest Way home with Yuri Pattison dream sequence and Liliane Puthod’s Beep Beep.

Curatorial interest

I am interested in the backgrounds and context in which artists come from – the histories, legacies and memories that might drive their practice. I am interested in what it means to be in the world and how practice might carve out a space to evoke feelings and thought.  How the inexplicable can be arrived at through paying attention, noticing and how somehow, this gives clarity, meaning to the artist’s work.   I like the idea of philosophical underpinnings and other sources that might drive a practice – that can be so wide-ranging from literature to art history, politics or spirituality.  I am interested in the setting, and consideration around how the context might inform the artwork - lend something to it/ or not.  How the work is made, and the process behind the work, that give it a sort of solidity (assuredness), inclusive of its vulnerability. These are elusive entry points, I admit.  I am curious about challenges undertaken by the artist that touch on things, like pain, beauty and, the just going on, across all mediums.

Born in 1963. LIves and works in Brest.
Represented by Galerie Vincenz Sala, Berlin

The artist and musician Ursula Döbereiner lives and works in Berlin and Brest. Her work focuses on drawing and electronic music. At the heart of her artistic practice is the transfer between the manual and the digital, between ideas and materials, and above all the relationship of the work of art with the social context and real space. In addition to her individual artistic work, she participates in various collective projects. Since 2021, Ursula has taught “editing/multiple images” at the École européenne supérieure d’art de Bretagne in Brest.

Born in 1987. Lives and works in Brest.
Represented by Sandwich Gallery, Romania

Anaïs Touchot tackles language. She addresses us directly, offering services through posters and slogans that play on capitalist injunctions for wellness and personal accomplishment. Her work reclaims amateur activism and protests the stress placed on performance, productivity and success that burden the artist and the world. Her art is always imagined alongside its participants, protecting it from the art world, with its jargon and mechanisms claiming to determine the legitimacy and value of a piece of art.

Born in 1982. Lives and works in Brest and Nantes.

Eva Taulois grew up next to the sea.
While drawing from a minimal, serial formal vocabulary, hailing from geometric abstraction, Eva Taulois’s work is part of a wider network of references which mixes architecture, traditional clothing, the art of patchwork, and industrial design…
She analyzes varied sociological, geographical and historical contexts which are the springboard of her research. The result of this is a repertory of forms (sculptures, paintings, installations) which reconcile art, craftsmanship and industry. Latterly, she has embarked on a project involving a comparison between stakes used for young trees and things used in the field of sculpture. She tries to find the right balance between verticality and horizontality. In the end, all this is very fragile and she wonders what keeps things together, upright.
In Eva Taulois’s work we find that tension between, on the one hand, the established rule, the norm applied to objects, gestures and bodies, and, on the other, the possibility of freeing oneself from that.

Born in 1987. Lives and works in Hanvec.

Guillaume Pellay manipulates painting with a total liberty. He often combines it with performances or sculptures, and links it to specific, everyday actions and contexts. He thus provokes a back-and-forth between public spaces and exhibition spaces.

This practice of painting is linked to other activities such as dance, publishing, reading or flowers and vegetable picking. From the crossing of these different aesthetic forms are born the narratives that the artist develops in his work. This taste for crossover is found in many other projects that Guillaume Pellay leads in duo or within artists collectives. Since 2018, he has been working with artist Blaise Parmentier on a project rooted in the practice of graffiti and tag, while with Mathieu Julien he created in 2013 the Éditions Peinture dedicated to the documentation and discussion of the forms and practices of current graffiti. Member of the collectives Moderne Jazz, Monstrare and ÒÒÒ (Die Drei), he was also co-programmer of the performance festival Setu. Source : 40mcube

Claire Laporte, director
La Gare, design & art center
Place de la Gare, avenue Ghilino
Le Relecq-Kerhuon

La Gare constitutes an open and lively Design place. Located in the idyllic setting of the Bois de Kéroumen which it adjoins, La Gare is a place of creation, hospitality and discovery of resilient artistic practices linked to art and design.

Born in 1997. Lives and works in Brest.

Emma Seferian is an artist and DJ, her practice revolves around site-specific installations and painting. Her work deals with the themes of memory in our living spaces.

Her sensitive approach to spaces, colours, sounds and smells leads her to study the question of the manufacture of objects, their provenance and their use.

In 2019, she is setting up a DJ collective from Rennes called “amour sucré”, in collaboration with three other artists. Within this collective are organized different types of events: exhibition, concert, dj set... Amour sucré is focused on the promotion and distribution of young artists (musicians and visual artists).

Lilian Froger, director
L'Imagerie, art center, Lannion

Opened in 1984, L’Imagerie is dedicated primarily to the promotion of photography and images (still or animated), from their production to their distribution to all audiences. Each year, the programming within its walls is done at the rate of three to four exhibitions per year. These are accompanied by the presentation of works from its collection (800 artworks), as well as by an invitation to a young artist from the Brittany region to create a work for the window overlooking the street. As an exhibition space, the art center also supports experimentation and artistic creation through residencies set up each year in the Trégor region.

Current exhibition : Par ricochet

Born in 1993. Lives and works in Rennes.

All my work focuses on the analysis of territories and their own specific features. During solitary walk, i cross landscapes with a common characteristic ; at a certain time they are abandoned indeed deserted. Thus, i survey the seaside towns in winter, ski resorts in low season, residential aeras during the week and agricutural landscapes the weekends.
In a methodical way, i draw, note, identify, classify and i collect shapes as clues in my investigation of the territory. This photographic and plastic research approches questions related to our way of inhabiting the landscape, of preserving it, but also of distorting it. I want to talk about this interval, this fair balance between land use planning and heritage preservation. This involves, for example, observing tourist activity and its impact on the environment. Most of the time, Man is represented by the trace he leaves behind him.
Back in the studio, i extend this landscape research through installation, screen printing, sound and sculpture. I use theses mediums to bring another dimension to the photographic work and to experiment on the image concept.

Born in 1983. Lives and works in Lannion.

After graduating from ENS Louis-Lumière in 2011, I developed my artistic work on the relationship between intimacy, individual and collective memory. Through games of re-appropriation, photographic associations and selfportraits, I initially worked on self-representations and the expression of legacies and a shared history, particularly on a family scale. From the outset, I have seen photography as a documentation - sometimes fictitious - ready to be manipulated and diverted by the use of photographic retouching, which is manifest in my work.

Since 2018, I have been combining this photographic work with ceramics, after training in Vallauris, famous for its ceramic production. These two aspects of my work - photography and volume - now feed off each other, as I reflect on the materiality of the images and the surface of the volumes created. My work tends to merge two universes by recontextualising the digital in the space of the real, and vice-versa. [...]

Artist's portfolio on DD'AB in process

Born in 1983. Lives and works in Lannion.

Cloud, stars, rivers and shores are all part of my work. Objects of contemplation since time immemorial, they are today the subject of concern and worry. Their permanence wavers, and predictions of their evolution are no lon- ger so simple and reassuring. Using a mathematical filter applied to the perception of space, I bring these natural in sculptures, drawings and photographs.
The forms that I propose arise from the interrelation between the domain of the sensitive and theories, pre- dictive or descriptive, developed from millenaies to describe the world (geometry, geology, meteorology, thermody- namics, chaos theory or elementary physics, etc.). I use science empirically, without numbers or equations, in order to induce a poetic reading of the mechanics of landscapes and more generally of the physical phenomena construc- ting daily, universal or anthropic space

Artist's portfolio on DD'AB in process

Elsa Briand, director
The Galerie du Dourven, Trédez-Locquémeau + Festival de l'Estran

The Galerie du Dourven is a creative and exhibition space dedicated to contemporary art. Located in an exceptional sensitive natural area of ​​16 ha, it rests on a rocky point on the coast of Trédrez-Locquémeau, at the mouth of the Bay of Lannion. Echoing this remarkable natural setting, the exhibitions presented highlight projects by current French and international visual artists, all techniques combined, around the notion of landscapes.

Born in 1988. Lives and works in Plougastel-Daoulas.
Represented by Maubert gallery, Paris

To me, artistic work is a commitment, a place where narrative possibilities and dialogues with the landscape are crafted. My approach most often stems from the immersion of my body in space, from the experience of time, and illustrates the highlighting of a presence within the world through the specific modalities in which image and language appear. In natural or urban contexts made of alterities and occurrences, it sometimes comes to one’s attention that the fragments chaotically collected during research aggregate into the tangible objects of a shareable narrative. However, in order to see a phenomenon manifest, one often needs to craft a tool. The work and the image can then be shaped into a hybrid form at the intersection of sculpture, performance and recording in its broadest sense. Within the space they are exhibited in, they become the manifestation of this praxis, of the interdependence between the location, the apparatus, the process and the imprint – a tangible trace born from an encounter with the landscape.

Born in 1989. Lives and works in Brest.


Julie Hascoët develops her projects in close connection to the territories she explores. From Brittany to Mexico and the roads of Europe, her work often features the same recurring figures: faltering lights, landscapes under heavy skies, damp rocks, breezeblocks and concrete, things left lying around, walls in construction or never completed, lying bodies and distant gazes. Her images, which conjure up the ruins of today’s world, carry within them a tension between the past and the future, between the fragile and the brutal. Her artistic research stands at the intersection of documentary narration and of a symbolic approach, and hinges on questions relating to territory and its occupation, as well as architecture, cartography and nomadism. Her practice of photography branches out into the fields of installation, writing and self-publication.

Loïc Le Gall, director
Passerelle contemporary art center, Brest

Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain is an exhibition venue, production, diffusion and mediation located since 1988 in an exceptional 4000 m2 industrial building in the heart of Brest. Passerelle is labeled "Center for Contemporary Art of National Interest".

Current exhibitions : Michele Ciacciofera / Han Bing / Amélie Caritey / Atelier Bellevue.
Current residency : Juliette Dennemont

Born in 1991. Lives and works in Bourg Blanc.

I have a master degree in fine arts (design) obtained at Ecole Européenne Supérieure d'Arts de Bretagne (EESAB) in 2015. Living near the Breton coasts and practising nautical activities drove me to develop a special taste for maritime landscapes and cultures. My first artworks were about how surfing objects could be considered as a dialoguing interface between human and environment. Surfboards are sculptures to use and from this departure point I try to unbuild surfing artefacts with the aim to adapt those surfing objects to specific contexts of use. In this way, I interrogated notions of sport performance, diy, traditional cultures, arts and crafts, handicap, biomimetism, material reuse, history, etc. These research were shown in several exhibitions in France, Spain, Italy and Australia and some pieces integrated public and private collections.
At the same time, I developed collaborative projects with other artists, designers and architects around public space furniture, community volunteering projects, material reuse and heritage. I develop those projects in different contexts of creation : territory residencies, education residencies, public orders, workshop producing.
All those experimentations drove me to recently engage in a new research axis around maritime heritage and architecture. I document what people are doing in the maritimes spaces with my camera and social sciences tools like field survey and interview.

Born in 1998. Lives and works in Brest.

[Google trad] Coming from a family of farmers and builders, Elouen Bernard explores in her artistic work the narrative potential of an environment and a context. Her sensitivity to the plasticity of the landscape is reflected in the care given to the materials that she meticulously collects to feed her sculpted, woven and braided works. At the heart of her practice lies the transmission of know-how between generations, promoting a local and family heritage. Seeking to rediscover and preserve artisanal techniques, her works are living witnesses to a collective memory. [...] Within the Hydre collective with six other artists, she engages in a shared artistic adventure where simple gestures - walking, gleaning, singing, weaving - generate rafts, boats, all kinds of vessels that become the vehicles of a collective story. [...]

Issue d’une famille de paysannes et de bâtisseurs, Elouen Bernard explore dans son travail artistique le potentiel narratif d’un milieu et d’un contexte. Sa sensibilité à la plasticité du paysage se traduit dans un soin apporté aux matériaux qu'elle collecte minutieusement pour alimenter ses œuvres sculptées, tissées et tressées. 
Au cœur de sa pratique réside la transmission des savoir-faire entre les générations valorisant un héritage local et familial. Cherchant à retrouver et préserver des techniques artisanales, ses œuvres sont des témoins vivants d’une mémoire collective. 
[...] Au sein du collectif Hydre avec six autres artistes, elle s'engage dans une aventure artistique partagée où les gestes simples - marcher, glaner, chanter, tisser - engendrent des radeaux, des bateaux, toutes sortes d'embarcations qui devenir les véhicules d'un récit collectif. [...] Doriane Spiteri

Born in 1963. Lives and works in Brest.

In 2005, after having lived in the Centre region, Sylvie Ungauer settled in Brittany and began teaching at the École Supérieure d’Arts de Brest. Moving around, with grants for residences and other art projects in France as well as abroad, is an integral part of Sylvie Ungauer’s development and work. From the very beginning, her experience at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, followed by several stays in Germany, proved to be rich in cultural and artistic exchanges which were to influence her production. The interest she has in issues concerning identity and feminism are more systematically supported by thought around the relationship to the « Other ». Sylvie Ungauer then developed artwork centred on the observation and study of the networks that structure our society, the relationships between individuals, the places where we live as well as the outside world. [...] Marie Lemeltier

Born in 1967. Lives and works in Brest.

Finizio’s work is dictated by the overwhelming material saturation surrounding us. With simple yet sophisticated tools, he utilizes the resources available to him. By employing concrete and everyday means, Finizio’s ongoing research into the languages and gestures of consumerism and mass communications, produce new and poignant articulations of our economic, cultural, social, political and artistic condition.

Through the use of DIY aesthetics and an often off-the-cuff approach full of humor and
self-irony, Finizio has been developing a unique and idiosyncratic body of work rooted in the observation of incidents and phenomena that revolve around questions of exchange and value, agency and cultural meaning. His installations operate as both events and models. They entangle the depiction of scripted spaces of commerce, habitat, display, construction, archive and work, with a model-like quality that actively speculates on the uses, statuses, and sentiments that these spaces perform. [...] Joshua Simon

Born in 1997. Lives and works in Brest.

Caroline Thiery navigates between doubts and perplexities - both intimate and political - that she formulates with a touch of absurdity. Why "the crumb picker doesn't work that well if the tablecoth is too porous?" she asks herself as a title for one of her texts. And "when all the water will be gone, what are we going to do with our greasy flesh?" she meditates ironically in one of her performances. Or is it a "failure situation or a great humility lesson for this brave temp job worker spirit?" she asks in her play Saucisse Intérimaire, as she recounts her attempts to label trays during a temp job in a supermarket. [...] Licia Demuro

Born in 1974. Lives and works in Brest.
Represented by David Guiraud gallery, Paris

[...] Vincent Gouriou’s photographic portraits sway certitudes and expectations. In varying degrees, they blur the line between masculine and feminine, nuance the definition of what constitutes a family, and go against the very idea of the norm, be it moral, social, physical, or sexual. (…) Sometimes underexposed, Vincent Gouriou’s photographs are suffused with a somewhat cold atmosphere and mineral shades. The shades of colour fluctuate between greys, blues, and pale green, making it hard to tell if they are to be called slate, ash, cobalt, pearl, or celadon. Nothing is definite, nothing is monolithic. On the contrary, indecision – whether chromatic or semantic – is what protects Vincent Gouriou’s work from any kind of standardisation. Lilian Froger