Elsa Guillaume
Visual Artist
April - May 2024
- Visual Arts
“While aboard the MARIUS, Elsa Guillaume will continue her practice of creating sketched travel diaries, which accompany her throughout all her explorations. She will also develop a new series of larger, freeform, poetic drawings informed by the more narrative, documentary style of the diaries.”
Elsa Guillaume graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2013, and has been a keen diver since 2010. Her creations blend together her passion for the sea with drawing and ceramics. With a scientific eye and a particular focus on environmental issues, she explores maritime worlds through diverse art forms, from drawing to sculpture, installation, and video. Her artistic practice combines research trips—whereby she uses drawing and photography to investigate the seabed and human activity at sea—and sculpture work in her studio.
She has taken part in various scientific expeditions at sea, on board the schooner Tara, at the Roscoff Biological Station, along the Norwegian coast, and, more recently, on board the schooner Persévérance, which is the supply vessel to Jean-Louis Étienne’s Polar Pod.
She set up her studio in Brussels, Belgium, in 2019. There, she creates works of drawing, sculpture, and installation. Shown regularly in France and abroad at group and solo exhibitions, her works have won a number of prizes, including the COAL Art and Environment Award.
While aboard the MARIUS, Elsa Guillaume will continue her practice of creating sketched travel diaries, which accompany her throughout all her explorations. She will also develop a new series of larger, freeform, poetic drawings informed by the more narrative, documentary style of the diaries.
As the chosen tool for a stay at sea or a solo voyage, the travel diary is ideal for training and honing one’s perception of our environment. It is a daily exercise, patiently constructed through amassing sketches and anecdotes of on-board life. These daily drawings are of great value to Guillaume, serving as a repository of information and inspiration for developing sculptures or installation projects upon returning to the studio. Creating larger, in-situ drawings at sea will be a first for her. Taking advantage of the vast space offered by the MARIUS container ship, she will bring larger sheets of paper, inks, and gouaches to produce works on a different scale than that of the diary, and extrapolate the graphic discoveries and themes that emerge from each page, in an aim to deepen the artistic and maritime experience.
Elsa Guillaume will set off for a six-week expedition on board an Atlantic-Pacific Artists Line container ship. Embarking at Nouméa, she will journey to Savannah by way of New Caledonia, the Australian east coast, New Zealand, and the Panama Canal.