Melanie Busnel
THE SHELL IN THE POTATO'S EYE
INTERVIEW ON AN ABANDONED BEACH IN THE ETEL RIA
DISCOVERING COLLAGE
How did you become an artist? When did you start out busking?
From a very young age, I spent every summer in my grandmother's workshop, where she owned a shop selling painted furniture, and I knew I wanted to follow in her footsteps. I studied art in France and Belgium, which required a great deal of technical skill, but it was collage that led me to the streets. I became obsessed with this technique in Brussels. There, I constantly kept an eye on what was happening outdoors. Back in Brittany, to make ends meet, I found work at a reprographics shop. I ended up proposing a deal to use his plotter. Having unlimited access to paper and ink allowed me to see things differently, to try enlarging and assembling. My first collages were born from get-togethers where I introduced my friends to the art while learning myself, in a friendly and festive atmosphere. I enjoy working in the street with people, whether they are neighbors, friends, or strangers; it's always a sharing experience. This began in a very naive way, without any particular study, by chance and spontaneously.
Why were you initially drawn to collage?
Collage offers a modular, playful, repetitive, and recreational aspect. It's possible to use a shape two hundred times with variations, whereas I didn't want to draw the same character so many times. I've perhaps revisited my bathers eighty times, but depending on the hat they wear or what they hold in their hands, they convey a different poetry and a different meaning. But the other thing that attracted me to collage is the material of paper and the act of thrifting, gleaning, and collecting. In Belgium, I spent my days at the Place du Jeu de Balle collecting engravings and different types of paper: drawing paper, newspaper, or sheet music.
Through this love of paper, did you already sense a desire to assemble?
I think that subconsciously I have a great attraction to sign painters and old posters from yesteryear. «Dubo…Dubon…Dubonnet!» », in which one could find slogan, text and image all at once. Some advertisements were thus completely surreal, and contained an element of imagination, of poetry, while having the possibility of expressing it in the public space.
So it was in Brussels that you started, step by step, to create your image bank?
Nowadays, I hardly use any of the Brussels prints anymore because my tastes have become more refined: I look for specific engravers, periods, and styles. But it was during this time that I truly began to develop my alphabet of forms, to acquire a taste for plants, tubers, mechanics, and all kinds of technical diagrams. I've always been interested in the old: my grandmother taught me how to hunt for bargains, how to rummage through trash, how to salvage, and this connection to secondhand goods is very much a part of me. I love this rummaging aspect, this archaeology of families and attics. Recent images don't interest me much. Moreover, there was this culture of Surrealism and collage in Belgium, which I also associate with the songs of Boris Vian, where anything is possible, where everything is playful, where everything is a joke.
Why did you choose not to use the original images? Was it a question of the desired size for your representations?
When I first discovered the reprographics machine, I cut out a lot of beautiful books, lovely plates of engravings, and sold small collages, cabinets of curiosities, pieces in globes and glass cases—mostly originals. But I found it very limiting: I wanted the lines of the engraving to become XXL, for the infinitely small to become large, like a seed. I wanted to create visual shocks, so that these works could be studied like anatomical exploded views. When the engraver is good, enlarging their lines creates an interesting optical effect that highlights their work.
WORK ON COLLECTIVE MEMORY
When you pick out these old images, do you feel like you're playing with collective memory?
It's very unconscious; when I work, I don't analyze what I'm doing, it's more of a sensory experience. This question of memory is often brought up by the public, by people who share their memories or tell me where the engraving comes from. It's important to know where an image originates. During my first workshops in schools, I was often asked what engraving was: it's very interesting to remember that it was a way of reproducing images before the camera and the iPhone. I truly believe that the graphic form of engraving isn't obsolete, but rather complex and still interesting to use. If I don't create engravings myself, it's because my work isn't about knowing how to "make" them, but rather about this archaeology of paper.
Are you interested in using these old images as material, or in sharing them with as many people as possible?
All my images come from the same period. I'd like to mix eras or techniques, but that would quickly lead to a more common style, which I don't want to fall into. There's also a handcrafted aspect to it. Knowing where an image comes from is important because I know where I found it, in which book, almanac, or magazine whose existence I was previously unaware of. When I find an image at a flea market, I'm thrilled, as if I've found a treasure. However, this discovery is more important to my personal process than to the final result, because I don't necessarily indicate the provenance of the pieces.
You have always cultivated this collector side, this guardian of memory.
I see myself as a collector-archivist, because behind each image lies a considerable amount of scanning time that I take very seriously. Like a guardian of memory, I preserve and refresh it. During my exhibition with Tuco, I wanted to find beautiful plates of tubers. After a week, I found a printer's palette with Vilmorin seed plates that had never been bound into a book. My engravings are my finds, my treasures, and I'm very proud of them.
Why focus on this period?
It's really the engraving technique, the style, and the increasing number of printed European and international newspapers that contributed, through this development of information, to a much more precise depiction of reality. Perhaps the quantity or the publishing process also played a role. There are some albums that, from a distance, you could mistake for photographs. Everything is engraved line by line: scenes of shop looting, fires. In Buffon's time, marine animals resembled monsters: but I find a beautiful whale more graphic. Then, I isolate my subjects to find the right pose. This is sometimes also a limitation in representation: I was once asked at an exhibition why there were no engravings of women in my work. But I replied that while I had romantic women in corsets, I was looking for aviators or women on stilts.
SURREALIST DREAMS
Have you always worked in this surreal universe?
When I'm gluing, I always have my own stories in mind, coupled with sayings, proverbs, and rhymes. I have a blast creating a series. This was also made possible by enlargements and successive reproductions. For my "strawberries" series, I once found a postcard of a Breton woman, for which I played with the idea of "laying down one's strawberry," inventing a multitude of expressions with this word.
In your creative process, do you imagine a certain combination of elements beforehand, or do they appear as you play with your shapes?
It's often engravings that inspire me. For Vilmorin, I had forty plates of potatoes. When I created it, I thought it was brilliant, that they could become planets. Also, I see all plants as potential headdresses. If I sometimes remove a few attributes, it remains playful and spontaneous. A kale head is, for me, just a hat, not a container. I recently had doubts about this use of multiples, but now I don't anymore; I embrace it.
It all depends on the approach: simply making a multiple doesn't make much sense, but taking an image and combining it with others to recreate it differently is not the same thing at all.
Each series is an echo of a period in my life. Laughing at oneself and the absurdity of things is good for oneself. Moon and potato bearers are recurring figures in my work: we should all be like that in our own way.
Your work contains an element of dream and imagination, which may echo the works of Jules Verne.
Everyone tells me that, but it wasn't intentional. My imagination actually comes more from Méliès' films, to which I'm very attached. Studio work is very important to me: it's about the handmade, the materials, the quality, the texture. I'm very meticulous about that. Regarding my artistic approach, I've certainly been very influenced since my studies by my friends who have circus or object theater companies: touring with them, working with traveling performers—this whole circus world of performance appeals to me enormously and permeates my collages and imagery. At first, when I went to do collages, I really thought you had to be politically engaged, or have something to advocate for, to be able to do it. For my part, I just wanted to create poetry, not to politicize.
Do you feel like you're working on a kind of visual exquisite corpse?
That's exactly it: exquisite corpse drawing was a revelation for me. I love academic techniques, but exquisite corpse, through repeated practice, has truly been liberating, thanks to the multiple possibilities and results it offers. When I give the children pictures, they tell me they'll all do the same thing because they all have a potato, a kale, a stick figure. But when we display all their pictures on the board, we realize that no one has done the same thing. Starting with similar elements, the creative possibilities are endless. I now do a little less "head, body, toe" than before, but the process is still there. The important thing is to find good connections so that the images deceive the eye.
URBAN APPROACH
In what way is the street a special creative space for you? Why did you want to take the plunge?
I appreciate the street for its verticality, the direct connection with people, but also for the ever-changing medium. I think at first I did it just for fun: it was the only large space I had available. Like a poster artist, I enjoy the way I'm present in the urban landscape and how my work deteriorates over time.
It was a small curiosity, but also a way to leave a trace.
This presence in the urban landscape is achieved through an inherently ephemeral medium.
The fact that paper is ephemeral and disintegrates delights me. I don't dwell on what I've done: when a painting is finished, I'm happy for it to go to the client and I don't like it when it stays in the studio. Several times people have asked me to make a collage permanent, but I've politely told them that it's somewhat contradictory. For a year now, snails have been nibbling away at my piece on the Ploemel train station. It bothers others more than it bothers me. There will be other things to look at.
Since the image is central to your work, would you say that the photography of your works is also central to it?
Personally, in my daily life, it's more about archiving. I worked with the La Meute collective, putting up posters at night with people with disabilities while the public followed us. It's a sound and light show, projected onto our collages. I wasn't able to see it because I was in the middle of the action, but the collective's photographs and videos surprised me. The image then exuded a different power, telling a new story.
Do you think urban art is an artistic movement? If so, do you consider yourself part of it?
I don't like that term at all; it encompasses a wide range of realities. I love street art, the act of poeticizing walls, of pasting things up. I feel like "street art" has become a big word. People have always written, pasted, or painted things on walls, and that will continue. Street art refers to all these realities of public space, to a weed growing between two paving stones. I want to be a bit of a wild child, to keep that creative freedom: sometimes I feel like people understand my work better than I do, as is the case at the Cabinet d'Amateur. Collage is still a relatively new technique for me, one I'm not about to give up. I'd much rather associate it more with live performance, street art, and set design. Pasting things up in urban spaces is indeed a way of staging the street: I'd like to bring my own unique touch to it.
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