Focus on the creative process of Madame

As an urban art centre, Fluctuart takes you to meet the artists in order to better understand her creative process. See you today with Madame.

Can you remind us who you are and your artistic practice?

My name is Aurelie-Ludivine, and I do collage under the pseudonym Madame. I work with old materials and volumes in my studio. I build small “damaged” and often manipulable objects, a kind of small curiosity cabinets where old materials (photos, engravings, drawings etc) and small sentences with multiple meanings are mixed. And this workshop work I transpose it in very large format in the street, in the form of posters.

What is your background, how did you start creating?

I first studied theatre for a long time, and in parallel to the masters that I did between Paris, Poitiers and Rome, I trained as an actor in a small company next to Tours, where I come from.

Born from a family of artists, I was very early fascinated by the world of arts thanks to my grandfather who was a stage designer at the Tours theatre and a painter (very classical). I was always pushed by my parents to creativity, drawings, sculpture, etc. were part of my daily life as a child. Later, drawing followed me a lot during my peregrinations because I lived abroad a lot, then when I came back to Paris, I quickly understood the limits of my drawing technique, and it is certainly because I was limited in my expression that I went towards collage.
One thing led to another and I met some taggers that I was following at the time to take pictures of them, then one of them discovered one evening the small collages I was making for me. It was his idea to print this in large format and put it on the street. Without him I would never have made the link between my studio work and the street.

In your daily work as an artist, what inspires you? What is the trigger for the creation of a work?

Everything inspires me! Everything, my daily life, my friends, my family, my loves, the news of course and my travels too, a lot… Everything is really matter.

The triggering element will be a sentence that pops into my head and that I’ll want to explore, or an image that I’ll have spotted in my archives and that I’ll want to dust off at that moment. It’s a dialogue between all that.

Can you explain to us how you build a work? What are the different stages of creation?

As I told you above, it can start either from a sentence that pops into my head, or from an image that struck me. Then I’m going to feed this sentence with images or this image with a sentence that it will evoke to me, and thus bring new elements that will feed the meaning.
Once I have all my elements I scan them to have them available and then create the street play. I edit the piece in volume, and then with the scanned elements I create an alias for the street. Not a carbon copy, something for the street that comes from the studio room. It’s about adapting the speech to the audience it’s intended for. Once the studio piece and the street piece are completed, I move on to a new story… A new play…

Discover below the collage of the work Retour de soirée

Find Madame in the exhibition Veni, Vidi, Vinci.