Maude
Arès

Twigs, small discarded objects, paper and textile samples, pieces of clay, bits of string, and pebbles form the substance of Maude Arès’s “mystery tools,” mobiles, and basins. Created to emphasize interactions between gesture and matter, her installations and the actions that animate them generate fragile microcosms to look at and listen to. Her assemblages are made and unmade in phase with the cycles that matter undergoes over time. Above all, they come into relation with what is already there—an ecosystem, its currents and winds, even its clouds of insects, its colonies of birds, and its plants. Listening is central to her practice; she is attentive both to the will of matter and to the ethics of the gestures with which it is manipulated. This attitude, adopted in the spirit of erasing the hierarchy among living things, entails being ready to let go. Arès invites us to place ourselves beside her to observe the transformations taking place before our eyes: a cradling, a taking flight, a dissolution, a ruin, an imbalance, like the transitory states of life on Earth.