On a base, magnified, a puddle of water contemplates the visitor, set in a transparent frame, both static and alive like a canvas or a floating sculpture.
Nourished by travel, multiple encounters with various materials, it was during a residency in Montreal that she became aware of water as a creative tool, an abundant and free raw material, a power that carries molecules and stories. The artist offers her multiple scenarios. She then declines in many forms – photograms, salt sculptures – the aqueous matter leading the visitor to marvel at micro-elements, often fleeting and instantaneous. Thousands of droplets are imprisoned to form a lunar landscape (La mémoire de l’eau series), saltpetre becomes an archipelago (Salpêtre), fire dances and becomes a mirage (Mirari series).
His works, often in a state of transition, are often in the process of becoming, and work with a precise protocol to make them exist. They are regularly brought to disappear, as if their value did not lie in their durability, thus provoking a reflection on the momentary and the precarious.
Capucine Vandebrouck scrupulously studies certain scientific and optical methods, also mastering the ancient processes of photography, experimenting with the meeting of materials with different supports, in the manner of a chemist.
It is the very simple experience of rain in her studio that led her to want to sculpt puddles. In a circle, split in two, on the ground or on a pedestal, the water is contained by a hydrophobic material, creating this enchanting device. Who has never dreamed of capturing water?
In this small pond, one looks at oneself, or one contemplates the world and its metamorphoses in an attempt to relearn how to see.

Born in 1985 in Tourcoing (France) I Lives and works in Strasbourg (France)

Trained at the Beaux-Arts in Bourges (2009) and the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin (HEAR) in Strasbourg (2011), Capucine Vandebrouck has been developing a delicate work for 10 years, weaving subtle ramifications between the vegetable and the mineral, the ephemeral and the fragile, art and science.
For the artist, it is a question of questioning the notions of temporality, especially slowness, in opposition to the brisk pace and productivism of today’s society and the art world in particular.