My Wild Heart Exhibition

Exhibition 'Mon Coeur Sauvage' by Marion Le Pennec from 5 August to 24 September 2023

"For the past two years, I have been working in secret on this new project: to paint the wild, the colour of women, from the inking of my own body. This project is a continuation of my work with Indian ink and is also a step backwards in terms of the usual device and process. Here, my intimate path as a woman becomes even more intertwined with that of the artist.

This project is rooted in a life: in Nature, I have explored the 'wild' and tasted its manifestations in the water, fire, earth and air of my own body. I have sought it out, listened to it, blown on its embers and activated its rivers. This path is a plunge into the depths of Life in its bridled, free and primal form. Naming this force is impossible without re-discovering it. Only by feeling can we understand it, for it is the Mystery itself. It is the matrix that generates each of the 10,000 beings. She is the Mother and also that which is given birth to. And without Her, alive in us, we are empty.

During these amorous immersions, body prints are born and then reworked in the studio. They are the traces of this ve'cu and carry its enigmatic message. Like the abundant creativity of Life, these traces of human beings have been given strange deployments. Having become a hybrid, as if emerging from the great primitive magma, the night-eyed being looks at us through the mirror paper and asks its eternal question: "Who are you?

Marion Le Pennec was born in 1973 and currently lives in Auray in the Golf du Morbihan, where her studio is also located. After a preparatory course at the Met de Penninghen school, she obtained a DEUG in Plastic Arts at the University, before entering the E'cole Nationale Supe'rieure des Arts De'coratifs in Paris. During this course, where she specialised in textile design, she also practised painting, engraving and photography - a world of black and white, which she loves. Her career began with the creation of textiles for costumes at the Ope'ra Bastille. A teaching mission in the same field led her to the University of Namibia, where she spent four months and took part in an international workshop in the heart of the red desert. On her return, she produced installations of 'Morceaux de nuit', which were presented in many places. She then joined the Ateliers Artistiques de la Ville de Vannes and led training courses and workshops for different audiences.

Later, she took up her brushes again and found new inspiration in black and white with Indian ink, which she sometimes mixes with other materials. Deeply touched by the work of Gao Xingjian and the inks of Victor Hugo, Marion Le Pennec explores the human experience and renders it in the form of a dance of light and shadow. This great passion for ink, associated with its partner, water, is practised as a song of the moment, nourished by the tradition of the "single brush stroke" specific to Asian painting.

In 2016, she was invited to an artistic residence in Tucheng (Guizhou, China) and was awarded the second prize for painting by the EWAAC in London.