Eva Jospin

It’s a fantastic project and a collaboration with a champagne house that I love. Ruinart has been supporting artists for a long time, not just with the carte blanche but in its domain. The carte blanche principle is very interesting for artists because the project will travel to all the big contemporary art fairs around the world for a year where collectors and art lovers will discover the works. So I worked on the idea that there’ll always be recompositions of which artworks will be shown together according to the fair.

I went to Ruinart during three or four times at different periods so I was able to observe all the cycles in the vineyards and the wine-making process. I found that there were invisible threads between the vineyards, the roots and the underground chalk cellars. I wanted to work on the idea of the secret links between what’s above and below and on the cathedral at Reims, a symbol of French history.

I started with the drawing ‘Carmontelle’ [a rolled drawing held between two cylinders that is a tribute to the eighteenth-century origins of Ruinart]. I wanted to express the idea of metamorphosis and how something simple like grapes becomes a bottle of Ruinart through a long transformative process. Then there’s the forest in bas-relief, embroideries, what I call the ‘chefs d’oeuvre’ sculptures in cardboard with architecture in between the grottoes, and undulating drawings resembling a map but that could also be like a view from up high. The gothic arch [in the main room] is like the beating heart of the exhibition, like a star, that branches out to other artworks. The large installation is a work that belongs to me and that I showed for the first time in Italy.

At the beginning, I really wanted to change the dimension of my work and I didn’t yet have nice projects like Ruinart or the means to realise artworks in other dimensions. I wanted to use cardboard because it’s a material that’s widely available everywhere that I could find in the street. I started picking up enormous quantities and working on them like forests. There’s the idea of something becoming full circle – how [wood from] the forest becomes paper and then recycled paper is made into cardboard.  It isn’t the most beautiful paper but I find it wonderful. I started developing a whole vocabulary of gestures and ways of working, thinking about how to represent something through inventing forms. My work is an exercise in abstraction; it’s figurative but never realistic. One has the feeling of recognising things but if one looks closely it’s never real plants or things that exist. It’s a recomposition through artifice.

On some projects which I can’t realise straight away, reading around a subject enables me to dream about it whilst waiting to do it. For example, when I wanted to make ‘Panorama’ [an installation in the Cour Carrée courtyard of the Louvre], I did a lot of reading which enabled me to be patient before being able to make it. And the embroidery project that I made for the house of Dior was something that I’d wanted to make for four years before it happened. I’d like to make a garden so I’m making lots of drawings of architectural follies. I think that I’ll also make a specific project about festive architecture – a catwalk show is a bit like festive architecture today – but I’ll have to see where and how I can do it. Things stay in my mind for a long time – like all the projects about grottoes that I couldn’t make immediately because I had to delve into other things first.

My collaborations are always with houses that have a very strong link with contemporary art. The creative director of Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri, is a collector and she always calls upon a woman artist to make the scenography for one of her fashion shows.  One could criticise this transversality but it’s a way of diffusing the new interest in contemporary art which is very strong today, which wasn’t the case 20 years ago. Artists were like stars in the 1950s; everybody recognised Picasso in the street. But today artists aren’t part of mass culture so [these collaborations] create more meeting points. It’s the variety of things that interests me, from these sorts of collaborations to museum shows.