gathering

Maude Léonard-Contant, gathering Maude Léonard Contant’s exhibition, gathering, unfolds as a wide, floor-based installation composed of meticulously demarcated surfaces of powdered lime, ash, charcoal, and matcha. Stenciled textual fragments punctuate these planes, while assemblages of heterogeneous materials form sculptural constellations across the room’s floor and walls. When stepping into a dark space, the pupils adjust, slowly discerning the contours of the room. Somewhat similarly, in gathering, a room that first appears like an empty beach gradually reveals a multitude of details, each emerging in its own time, until meaning begins to take shape.
The exact layout of these ground-hugging sands draws you into a subtle play of scale, provoking a fleeting sense of gigantism or diminishment. It reads as a map or a maze, depending on the path one chooses to follow. Moving on all fours could be one way to experience the exhibition fully: crawling, kneeling, sniffing… The evocation of childhood is no accident: in this trail of soft greys, muted greens, beiges, and blacks, a kind of memory lane is gathered, conjuring both the artist’s own childhood and the experiences of her children on a recent trip to Canada, where she grew up. gathering is the portrait of a summer, told through sensations. Like a biographical rumor, it mixes and blurs the borders between lived moments and their after-images. Each material elicits an immediate bodily and cognitive response that mirrors the artist’s conscious desire to relinquish rational arrangements, as suggested by the exhibition’s title. Yet this “gathering” of stuff is anything but random. Since meaning can only grow out of intimacy, one quickly learns (or rather feels) that the landscape laid at their feet is nothing less than mourning materialized. For context, and context only, the recent passing of Léonard-Contant’s father fueled many aspects of the exhibition. A certain feminist caution would advise against divulging biographical information, as if the exhibition’s autonomy could be jeopardized by it. But such considerations feel irrelevant here, because the work inhabits a register of feeling that is intuitively accessible: grief. The grief sensually and matter-of-factly explored in gathering extends far beyond the personal; it gestures toward a larger, planetary grief for all things, human and non-human, already gone or on the cusp of extinction. Some years ago, certain elements dear to the Léonard-Contant became the subjects of a series of love letters. One quickly understands that asclepias, cattail, mullein, raspberry leaves, and buttercups are her true vegetal tribe, and have been fulfilling every vital function one may need throughout life, from sibling to lover, parent to friend. Some of them populate gathering, including milkweed, white sage, and pearly everlasting. Gratitude and infatuation seep through. Like the aftermath of a sleepless night, a sensual intelligence lingers, perhaps the only one still functional (and acceptable) in times of grief.
Grief for someone lost, grief for a world gone, grief for a time passed, never to return. In the exhibition’s soft palette, a few elements contrast starkly. Still on the floor, small, pointed forms, each sized to fit a human palm, hold the deepest possible black. First carved by the Léonard-Contant out of poplar, chestnut, and ash wood, they are pieces of charcoal burnt in the kilns of the KöhlerInnen in Entlebuch, central Switzerland. Touching their glistening surface, smooth like a crow’s feather, briefly disrupts the expected symbolism of mourning and death – their shine carrying the long history of charcoal as a material believed to protect and purify. The charcoal burners who produced it maintain a solitary, centuries-old craft surrounded by myth. They were once said to return from the forest blackened and with pockets full of money, a sign of the woods’ favor and their own divinatory powers. For this project, Léonard-Contant collaborated with Doris Wicki, a former hairdresser, descendant of a charcoal-burning lineage, and the only female charcoal burner in Switzerland, whose presence folds yet another layer of embodied knowledge into the work. Spots of ultramarine blue punctuate the ensemble like small, deliberate interruptions. A piece of cobalt salt lick, typically used in regions where soils are low in cobalt, including parts of Switzerland and Canada, rests at the edge of one of the sandy compositions. This unassuming block, with its four cartoon-like fingers, holds a standard mineral supplement for cows. It is essential for vitamin B12 synthesis, a quiet biochemical labor on which the longevity of both human and animal life depends. A little further on, bright blue spirulina powder gathers at the bottom of a stoneware bowl, as if waiting to be dissolved, absorbed, or otherwise put to use. If these elements contribute to the visual cadence that holds the installation together, they also form a modest yet insistent pharmacopeia. Their life-supporting, restorative properties enrich the arrangement: they introduce the suggestion that the exhibition does not merely represent a wounded world but also tends, however tentatively, to its repair. Healing here is not an instruction or a promise; it is a possibility, one woven into the mineral, the botanical, and the corporeal, into everything that persists despite the odds. Though monumental in its precision, the exhibition’s evanescence presumes fragility. A gust of wind, a viewer’s misstep, a child’s clumsy crawl, and the whole thing could dissolve into a mess. Léonard-Contant highlights how each material undergoes its own cycle of transformation, unfolding simultaneously yet on vastly different timelines. Minerals break down over geological time, matcha shifts in moments. Robert Smithson’s notion of entropy comes to mind, but here monumentality lies elsewhere. Not in weight or scale, nor in any assertion of durability. Instead, Léonard-Contant’s work draws its power from refusing grandiosity altogether. It chooses the tremor, the rot, the mold, the oxidation through arrangements that know (and show!) they might not survive the hour. This is a monumentality built from susceptibility rather than dominance, a poetics of almost-collapse. The delicate engineering of materials insists on their own perishability and mutability. If it could speak, this exhibition would refuse to posture, testing how little it takes for meaning to hold, and how much beauty can emerge from the possibility that it might, at any moment, give way. Against Smithson, Judy Chicago’s inventories of things and people linger in the background, and Léonard Contant’s inventory of memories-made-matter reads like a guest list. At this gathering, no one, no thing, is missing, much like the names set around Chicago’s 1970s Dinner Party. Among those sitting at Léonard-Contant’s imagined table, her father features high on the list. A piece of dried lichen, cut into a square and sliced diagonally into four, recalls the toast he asked her to cut for him during a surge of lucidity before his death. Though the piece is true to size, its texture, I’m told, echoes the texture of her father’s beard. The “toast” rests at the center of a large surface of yellowing matcha. Depleted of chlorophyll, the soft powder carries the faint smell of a vintage book. Under the steady glare of the bay window, its former intensity has quietly receded. What is decay if not transformation? Analogies with the artist’s father and his own (deceased) organic materiality are hard to avoid. Yet such literal facts about decomposition quickly fade, as the simple poetry of a piece of toast returns. Further on, a stenciled phrase made of sifted sand refers to oyster mushrooms once picked by Léonard-Contant and left to rot quietly in the fridge’s vegetable drawer. The text sits along the edge of a perfectly squared sandy surface, yet as the letters appear, the geometry gives way: the straight line unravels into a filament of words. What was a clean right angle becomes a contour shaped by language, a controlled spilling where meaning literally pushes the material past its assigned border. Her sifting-through-stencil method carries the resonance of a signature, as for years it has produced a double movement, in which precision fuels chaos and entropy. The resulting sentences are often enigmatic, almost cryptic; they draw on small incidents of lived experience, forming a fragile thread that seems to vanish at the exact moment one thinks they have grasped it. Unmediated, such fragments are highly unreliable in the traditional way. In gathering, more than in any previous exhibition, they seem even more fleeting, as if Léonard-Contant were slowly but surely giving up on any stable signifiers. When everything is taken away*, what will remain in the ledger of a single summer spent trying to hold grief still? Or rather: how does one catch a memory before it escapes? And what rises to the surface when you return to the place where you grew up, and the landscape recalls you with a clarity you no longer possess? — Elise Lammer Elise Lammer is a curator and author based in Lausanne. She is currently the director of Halle Nord in Geneva. * With Everything Will Be Taken Away (2003–13), Adrian Piper explores the inevitability of loss, reflecting on both mortality and the unfolding of time.