" It is also the cause of this attention to chance that I most often keep all the excess thicknesses, drippings of wax and paint. During the covering of plants, wood or minerals with multiple layers of beeswax, then white acrylic paint, there are sometimes drips, superpositions... I am attentive to these traces of the gesture of the work, and instead of erase, I keep them as they appeared during the work: An irruption of chance, which completes the work in progress."
Isabelle D'Assignies was born in 1958 in Saint-Etienne. After leaving the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Mâcon in 1981, she worked on figurative sculptures in sandstone as well as ceramics, which, in the euphoria of the 1980s, immediately met with a certain success. In 1987, a workshop accident disrupted her work. One night in February, the frost exploded all the sculptures waiting to be fired in the workshop. In the morning, Isabelle d'Assignies discovered all her figurative works exploded, broken down into layers, revealing a fantastic material... which led the artist to realize that figuration, the figurative form, had kept her away from the matter. This workshop accident is a breaking point. From then on, she decided to continue in the direction where chance had led her... she interrupted all her exhibitions, in order to freely pursue sculptures made with matter, nature, time and chance...
This lonely side road will last seven years. In 1994, the artist resumed exhibitions, with non-figurative work in which she makes the accidental visible, she perpetuates the ephemeral. Her work begins with the collection of plants, roots, minerals, wood... which are collected in nature, and then left to dry in the workshop, then coated with beeswax, paraffin, plaster, white acrylic paint , sometimes bronze... Multiple layers of wax and paint cover the initial natural object, creating like a skin, a petrification, giving the work a strangeness, sometimes a lightness, situating it in an elsewhere different from its usual natural environment. The works produced in this way are suspended by transparent nylon threads or fixed in entomologist boxes, or on wooden supports, sometimes on floorboards, or hung on walls.
