Anne Poirier, and her husband and work partner, Patrick, cite formative years spent in France following the Second World War, among rubble and ruins, as the motivation behind their focus on history and memory, places and their construction in the imagination.
The Poirier's began to work together in the late 1960s. They visited sites of classical history such as the Emperor Nero's Domus Aurea, a palace built beneath the Coliseum. Recording and reinventing places they had seen, they made and assembled a mosaic of models, maps and moulds of statuary. The collections were intended to coalesce in the viewer's mind into a fantastic vision, conjuring up sub-strata of mythologies and meanings hidden from the conscious mind. Their effect was heightened by the manipulation of scale. Your eye could sweep over a Lilliputian model of an entire city, or be brought up short by the awesome Piranese-esque immensity of a pillar's foot. But the Poirier's do not only work with the past. From 1979 to 1980 they made intricate plans for a Circular Utopia of 140 white ziggurats. Housed within were to be 'Utopian texts, themselves classified by a bizarre and complex method that is not yet fully understood'. Such schemes recall the imaginary libraries of the Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges.
From 1989 to 1992 the Poirier's worked on De lafragilite du Pouvoir (Of the fragility of power), a collection of stone forms that appeared to be fragments of massive sculptures and collapsed columns, pierced with arrows. The scene recalled Shelley's poem Ozymandias. More recently, they have worked on a smaller scale, photographing arrangements of punctured globes, fruit, furry with mould and dead flowers. Withered petals appear in a series of photographs of 1996, their surfaces scratched or burnt with words, 'sex', 'fragility', 'wounds' and 'vanitas'. The Poirier's have said that they have been influenced by the American filmmaker David Lynch, whose trawl through the dark underbelly of wholesome American suburbia in the 1986 film Blue Velvet is presaged by a line of perfect roses and tulips. |
