Diane de Kergal

I went on holiday to Senegal where I fell in love with a gigantic mango tree. Beneath it was a herd of starving cows with a shepherd that were eating the mangos that had fallen onto the ground. This inspired my drawings of the trees. For me, what’s important today is talking about wonderment. The aim of my work is to amaze people so they feel transported by something. Through this forest, I wanted to translate the awe that one feels about a sunrise, birds in flight or in front of a tree.

Another important element is freedom. I worked on a mould of a clay head with hands hiding the eyes; the head was a sort of bird which symbolises freedom. The work is also about looking up and imagining another future. It’s an optimistic vision with a bird flying off the tree towards the sun. There’s always a link to childhood in my work. I have a young daughter who needs to believe in hope and in creating something new in our world. I’m not engaged politically but I’m engaged poetically. It’s through poetry that one can transmit lots of things and give people the capacity for wonderment.

I worked on it day and night for two months, dreaming about cocoons. It was a big challenge because there are seven trees, two birds and a sun. It’s a meticulous work but I’m happy and relieved to have installed it.

I love Brancusi and how he expressed the meaning of things in his work. It wasn’t easy for me to portray a bird in flight but Brancusi was a master in this domain. I also love Matisse and there’s obviously something to do with Matisse in the birds. And [Isamu] Noguchi and how he captured the vibration of light through washi paper. Silk also offers a completely particular vibration of light that takes you into another world.

I was also extremely moved by [Indigenous Australian artist] Sally Gabori’s exhibition at the Fondation Cartier last year and her paintings of the Morning Glories – a phenomenon of enormous clouds [on Bentinck Island].

It enabled me to familiarise myself with textiles, forms and sewing. Everything that I’ve done – from decorative painting to interior architecture – has given me the instruments needed to create these forms. I’ve always worked in the creative field but under different angles. I’m completely free now in what I make in my art. For me, freedom is something very important. I’d like to thank Galerie Gosserez for supporting me because she just betted on drawing [of the installation] and then financed the project.

As an interior designer, I’m very minimalist in my work and what’s essential is space and light. So I drew organic forms that would diffuse light and I wanted to use a natural material. My cabinetmaker knew a young woman who had studied at École Boulle [a design and applied arts school in Paris] who was working with silkworms. When I met her, it was love and synchronicity at first sight. She could see cocoons in my drawings and was making cocoons in her work. She’s around 35 and making a unique, patented material after developing a technique to make the silkworms weave in a flat way. Initially, she had a small studio without electricity in the middle of a forest. We had to find a method so that the silkworms would spin their cocoons around a form that we could subsequently remove. It was complicated but eventually we found a solution and evolved.

Each piece starts with a drawing. Then I make gridded forms onto which I apply the plaster, then make silicone moulds that I take to the Cévennes where the silkworms weave their cocoons around the moulds. Back in my studio, I finish the pieces by adding on more layers of the same silk in order to obtain the desired form.

The next step is taking the pieces to the cabinetmaker ARCA, created by Steven Leprizé, with whom I work on my interior architecture projects. His father in St Malo and I go and look for branches of different woods – such as beech, oak and ash – in the forest. Sometimes I find a branch that corresponds to a drawing, sometimes it’s a branch that inspires me.

For ‘Above the Sun, only Sky’, I found the branch for the birds first and then had the idea of putting the birds onto it. By contrast, I drew the branches of the mango tree and then found the branches that corresponded to my imagination. It’s always a back and forth between nature and me. What’s also important is the collective, human aspect. Today all the borders between people working in nature and agriculture are porous. I want to work with people that I like because if we have a good team, the resulting piece will be beautiful.

This is the first time that I’ve introduced colour. I waited until the last minute before doing so. It was complicated to give myself this mission because the forests are beautiful in white. But I’m delighted with the result. The blue bird is flying towards the sky while the golden sun is that of sunrise. It’s also new for me to make an installation that tells a story. I’d like to be able to make more narrative works and an imaginary forest where lots of things happen and through which one can meander. I don’t want my objects to be considered as lamps.

What I’d like is that this work, ‘Above the Sun, only Sky’, is respected as it is for one place. Will a collector be moved enough to integrate it [into their collection] as an ensemble? I’d be sad if the trees and other elements were sold separately. In the future, I’d like my forest stories to remain whole. I’d also like to have the opportunity to create installations for places, even for a hotel. I’d also like to present my forests outside in a dialogue with the outdoors; we’re studying a way to work [on waterproof materials] to enable that. I belong to a generation where we all want to engage with ecology, which is why we’re using a sustainable material.