(French-Dutch, b.1998, London)

To value a texture

Akin to diaphanous relics {1}

‘When the ear tells the eye where to look’ {2} 

A joy-noir atopic eroded our city of skins. {3}

We coaxed up a land with our bones, armour, bruise

For a wild Mélusine to appear in the factory loos {4}

Mistaking her products for sins

I confess, in the mess, your trash is my kin.

Pieces you leave me, my peace I give you 

Look not on her sins but on the trace of your worths 

In this murky keep, our freedom sings

Why protect us from all anxiety? 

So I make in joyful scope

For the loving of a stateless 

Dreamer geist. 

My name is Apolline, I am an audio-inflected Surrealist and bricoleuse, applying the act of listening to materials and their memories.

My work is an ongoing archive of sorts. A dialogues with surfaces. I’m interested in questioning conventional notions of value attached to surfaces. In particular, those surfaces and textures which are wasting away. Using waste generated from previous projects as my starting point, I create drawings, paintings, cut-outs, collages and assemblages of adornment where I seek to transform the material in question into something textured, strange, melancholic of process, and avoiding any single representation. What is valuable is what you choose to point out to me.

My practice hinges on this process of social-material collaboration. I explore the point at which a material is erased in order to understand its present condition as a resource, whereupon I re-engage with curiosity. Doing so forges a relationship based on haptic listening, where I learn about myself, the history and physical conditions of the materials at hand simultaneously. I hope my work can offer you a space to explore similar forms of haptic engagement.

My work is a no-en which often comes close to, but never fully arrives at, representations of reality {5}. There are aqueous textures, figures, fibres, road signs, translucent glazes and gauzes, webs, flesh, ghosts of animals, goat eyes and debris which somehow always feature: traces of a surreal atmosphere I feel a close affinity with. My experience of woking in Willesden Junction is fundamental to my interest in residue and erasure, and formed the crucible of the works on this page. It remains one of the last pockets of London where you might experience an attentive decay: a decay forming full part of the locality aware of its own mortality: it too will be swallowed by an unsustainable rent market and rapid surface occupations. I am sensitive to the ongoing disappearance of this locality, these surfaces mean much to me, and I am hopeful that I might foster a sense of belonging through my own ritual engagement with these surroundings. I take peeling paint, ripped posters, grafitti, chemical decay and dust lines as inspiration, but equally, the colour palettes of my favourite album covers, photos exchanged on our phones, unruly natural spaces, and microscopic details of mineralisation and contrast mined from London, on any given day.

I am grateful to the ongoing Surrealist movement for bringing my main tool - "détournement" - into focus — the idea that the subverting, reusing and enmeshing of symbols and their learnt associations can empower the abstract into something richer in its malleability of meanings. I like how expansive and immediately accessible everything becomes through their eyes. This page consists of some of those threads, born from my late studio: an old Rolls Royce warehouse turned fish factory turned storage unit turned gym.