Salle Jean Despas, Place des Lices

In the presence of the Caledonian artist Marie Claudel

Originally from New Caledonia, born to an islander mother and a father from Lorraine, I arrived in France aged 26. I had to cope with and eventually overcome a huge culture shock - so many changes of codes and rhythms, and what to do with all those gentle customs and reassuring rites that had nurtured my childhood?
Resuming my studies and consecrating my energies into my passion for art were the departure points for a re-birth. Galvanising my energies into my studies soon took on a virtually existential need of their own, and led me through the creative process, in a quest to make sense of my own cross-fertilisation. Like a bridge between New Caledonia and France, my artistic creation is an incarnation of my identity, it symbolises this duality and enables me to maintain an equilibrium in the midst of being uprooted.

My knowledge of Tribal Art and my passion for Art Brut has helped me to express myself freely in my graphic art, free to retain an organic relationship in my painting and to stake a claim over painting in exile - created from cultures and traditions.  The kind of painting which uses the colours of the southern hemisphere, and which allows me to affirm my own identity. An image comes into my mind and I have to sketch it, to let the lines run, and the drawing then transforms itself during the course of the process until it has matured and developed. The use of colour then instinctively changes the life and emotion of the scenes I've drawn, scenes which deal with mans relationship with nature and the invisible world.
It's a weaving of many different elements - kanac and Polynesian motifs, and aboriginal pointillism - an intermingling of all these influences, suffused in an oceanic bath. Created with cerne-relief and a glue gun, the motifs saturate the space and allow a visual play to take place between the flat surfaces and the lines in relief.

I take over the space in a meditative way and let myself be taken by surprise by the mass of details. In my world of symbols, the element of water symbolises the flux of life, the fecund liquid which covers and pollenises the other elements. The representation of the feminine being has a predominant place; its image symbolising the fertile source, the matrix, the creation of all possibilities.  A generic metaphoric character in a close bond with nature and mother earth, and with a multiplicity of characteristics: earth mother, dreamer, builder, child, procreator, giver of nourishment who, true to her beliefs, assumes her power.