Tournée vers la mer, Hortense Le Calvez interroge les représentations des énergies et l'histoire des techniques. Son expérience de la plongée et de la navigation lui apporte une perception singulière de la physique du quotidien, où elle interprète les trajectoires baroques des gaz et des liquides. Ses récents volumes et reliefs en céramiques évoquent une accumulation d'aléas, de débordements et de mécaniques ordinaires. Oscillant entre flux techniques et atmosphériques, sa pratique dessine une forme d'entropie domestique. De ces vannes, pompes et robinets s'échappent des micro-déluges du quotidien, participant à des cycles vertigineux où l'eau retient des solides en suspension et l'air charrie des particules flottantes.
Hortense Le Calvez ( 1988, vit et travaille à Brest ) a étudié à la Rietveld Academy d'Amsterdam de 2006 à 2008, puis au Wimbledon College of Art de Londres de 2008 à 2010.
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From a marine perspective, Hortense Le Calvez's practice, examines representations of energy and the history of technology. Her experience as a diver and sailor informs her singular perception of everyday physics, through which she interprets the baroque trajectories of gases and liquids. Her recent ceramic volumes and reliefs explore notions of overflow, meteorological exchanges, and ordinary mechanics. Oscillating between technical and atmospheric flows she portrays a form of domestic entropy. From these valves, pumps, and faucets escape micro-deluges of the everyday, participating in vertiginous cycles where water holds solids in suspension and air carries floating particles.
Hortense Le Calvez ( 1988, lives and works in Brest ) she studied at the Rietveld Academy of Amsterdam from 2006 to 2008, and in London at the Wimbledon College of Art from 2008 to 2010.
Hortense Le Calvez, an artist based in Bretagne in close proximity to the sea and who has spent years living on a boat in Greece, works at the intersection of human experience and the elemental forces of nature. Her practice is co-shaped with water as a conceptual lens throughwhich to explore total immersion, continuity and the permeability between human and non-human worlds. In Le Calvez’s work, the body feels at home in the environment, resonating with Emanuele Coccia’s reflections in Philosophie de la maison: a dwelling is not only shelter, but a mode of attuning oneself to the rhythms of the world.
Her most recent solo exhibition, VOLUTES (Galerie Chamagne, Paris, 2025), exemplifies this approach. Composed primarily of glazed stoneware ceramics, the show is a metamorphosis of forms and techniques. The works evoke tools and objects from life aboard a boat, especially container of gas and liquids, echoing the origins of life. Long before economy, value, or exchange, life emerged from what science describes as a primordial soup: a dense, chemical milieu in which inert elements organized into self-sustaining systems. Le Calvez’s engagement with these substances situates human experience within a continuum of life,linking the intimate and the cosmic, the domestic and the planetary.
Here, we might read her containers through the lens of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, in which the visionary author retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. In Le Calvez’s hands, containers are relational instruments: they hold not only liquids or gas, but the traces of lived experience, the acts of sharing, cooking, and being together. They are vessels of connection, mediating between the material and the social, the quotidian and the elemental.
Immersion has been central to Le Calvez’s practice since her earlier works, such as HOW NOT TO MELT YOUR WINGS? (2019, Hydra, Greece), an underwater performance reminiscent of Icarus. Unlike the mythic pursuit of flight, the work invites the audience to dive alongside her, reshaping the sensorial experience of looking at an artwork. The wet choreography evokes a world under threat, touching on climate change, rising sea temperatures and ecological precarity. The sublime beauty of these environments—the ocean’s depths, or the cosmic vastness explored through analogous technologies — reflects humanity’s desire to master its surroundings, even as both water and air slip beyond our control. This dialogue between ancient technologies and contemporary interventions recurs across her oeuvre. Tools are prostheses of the body, mediators of perception and devices for negotiating a complex, opaque world. In Appareillage Sauvage (2021, Festival d’Art de L’Estran; later at Unknown Unknowns, Triennale di Milano), Le Calvez juxtaposes paddles and rotational movement with robotic technologies, uncovering the interplay between simplicity and mechanization. Absurdity threads through her work as a critical antidote to certainty in a capitalist, materially driven world.
This tension is epitomized in Persévérance (co-produced by Voyons Voir, Centre d’art F.Léger, and Région Sud, Manifesta 13). Here, an 18th-century mechanized rowing vessel by John Fitch is re-imagined as a photovoltaic-powered e-boat. The work bridges historical and contemporary technologies, tracing pivotal moments where humanity’s choices shaped the present. It is playful, even ludique — e-boat afloat in Marseille — but beneath its charm lies a meditation on human ambition, environmental precarity and the absurdity of our pursuit of control. Le Calvez’s work asks: how do we inhabit these contradictions, and how do we make sense of the world while immersed in its ceaseless, swirling currents, from the primordial to the planetary?
At its core, Hortense Le Calvez’s work navigates the currents of technological history,immersion and the absurd. Her art is a lens through which we can confront ecological anxiety, tracing the moments when humanity’s technological choices have shaped the present. She invites us to inhabit contradictions: to feel the intimacy of daily life alongside the immensity of planetary and primordial forces, to perceive the beauty of human ingenuity while sensing its fragility. In this way, her work becomes both a meditation and a guide,accompanying us through the complexities of our entanglement with the elements and the cascading consequences of our technological decisions, illuminating the absurd, the poetic,and the vital at once.
Eleni Riga, Curator and Cultural Producer
07 78 43 62 50 | hortenselecalvez@gmail.com
CV
Hortense Le Calvez, née en 1988, vit et travaille à Brest
EXPOSITIONS
SOLO / DUO
2025
Volutes, Galerie Chamagne, 16 Septembre - 25 Octobre Paris
2023
Co-autrice du film Bakelite avec Julie Gautier, production Imagine 2050
2020
PERSEVERANCE, programme les parallèles du sud Manifesta13, co-produit avec voyons voir | art contemporain et territoire et Le Centre d’Art Fernand Léger de Port de Bouc. Marseille, France
2019
AMPHIBIE Exposition avec Elsa Guillaume, Espace Catherine Bastide, Marseille, France.
2017
SOFT DENIAL, Installation dans une piscine publique, produite par FOTOPUB Festival, Novo Mesto, Slovénie.
DISORIENTED, Installation in situ, Juillet-Aout, Vlychos Beach, Hydra Island, Greece
2016
AUTOTOMY, Installation in situ, Vlychos Beach, Hydra Island, Greece
2015
Festival Arts à La Pointe, Église Saint Raymond, Audierne, France
Phycologie Nébuleuse, Galerie L’Harponneuse, Grandcamp-Maisy, France
Fotograficasa, Smantillà, Exposition sur le quai du port de Macinaggio, Corse, France
COLLECTIVE
2025
Juillet Aout 2025 : « L’eau... » , Festival IN CITE, Rostrenen, France
Septembre 2025 : FESTIVAL de L’ESTRAN, installation in situ, Bretagne, Trégastel
2024
CAVERNA AMPHIBIO, Astérisme, Sainte-Marine, France
2023
Projection Bakélite, Climax Festival, Marseille, France
Festival GRAND BAIN, scénographie, piscine de recouvrance, Brest, France
2022
UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS, curated by Ersilia Vaudo, Triennale de Milan, ITALY
17 Chambres, Maison de la Fontaine, BREST
2021
FESTIVAL de L'ESTRAN, installation in situ, Bretagne, FRANCE
Festival GRAND BAIN, installation in situ, piscine de recouvrance, BREST
2018
SUPER SYNTHÈSE, Exposition Itinérante sur L’Urgence Climatique, L’Unique Caen, FRANCE
INITIATOR Residency & Exhibition, Eleusis 2021 European Capital of Culture, Installations in situ curated par Anne Langlois, directrice de 40mcube, Rennes, et Benoit-Marie Moriceau artiste et directeur de the Mosquito Coast Factory Workshop Nantes.
2017
OVERNEATH, Northen-Southern Gallery, Austin Texas, USA
Biennale d’Art Video VIDEOPROJECT, L’Arthothèque d’Angers x L’association L’Oeil d’Oodaaq
Festival du film de Houlgate x L’association L’Oeil d’Oodaaq
2016
Shells, sheep, time and light… Halsnoy Kloster Monastery, Halsnoy, Norway
Exposition VISION, Laboratoire de recherche ESAM Caen/Cherbourg , PALAIS DE TOKYO, PARIS
2015
Visite d’Atelier et projection lors de la Résidence L’Harponneuse, Grandcamp-Maisy, France
Visite d’Atelier et projection lors de la Résidence Fotograficasa, Rogliano, Corse
Oser L’eau, exposition collective au Musée du Pays d’Ourthe Amblève, Belgique
2014
4e prix de la jeune création, L’Atelier Blanc, St Rémy
Narcose, L’inlassable Galerie, Paris
Archisle #2, Guernsey Photography Festival
Festival International du Film Insulaire de Groix
Les Boutographies, Montpellier, La projection du Jury
Festival Traverse Vidéo, Galerie Concha de Nazelle à Toulouse
White Cube / Dark Cube, Sidney Cooper Gallery, Kent, UK
Dusseldorf Photo-Weekend Festival, Portfolio Review
2013
Art and Science, The Point Gallery, Doncaster, UK
Of The Afternoon, Power Station Gallery, London
Archisle#2, Interior Exterior, Jersey Arts Center, Jersey
ART IS HARD Festival, Wharehouse of Kubes, Rethymno Crete
NeoArtPrize Exhibition, Neo:gallery22, Bolton, UK
Climate Change Conveying Realities, Ecoart lab Georgia Athens, US
2010
Luxury of Time, Tokyo Wondersite, Tokyo
Graduation Show, Sculpture, WCA, London
Take a Line for a Walk, WCA, Curated by Soraya Rodriguez, London
2009
Cannizaro Park 09, University of Arts London, Wimbledon, London
The Dimension of the Present Moment, Tunnel Gallery, Kent, UK
PUBLICATIONS
Paper : Sailing Today ; Limbo Press ; Famo Rivista Atlantide ; Ouest France, August 2013 ; Cambridge
University Magazine (cover) March 2014 ; Newsweek, June 2014 ; Ethnos newspaper Athens
; STUDIO JOURNAL KNOCK MAG the Europe Issue (cover) 2016 ; Tovima Newspaper Sunday
edition supplement ; Water Journal 2nd Issue 2017 ; Le Decalee 2020 ;
Film : France 5, Vue Sur Terre, The Agean Sea, August 2013 ; Documentaire Forlane
6 de Michele Di Salle au Festival international du film d’Environnement au cinéma des cinéastes à
Paris, Février 2014 et en Mars 2016 sur SKY ARTE
Online: Le Journal du Design ; Il Post Milano ; Inhabitat ; Art Nouveau ; FastCoCreate ; Ignant ;Wired ; Fubiz ; La Boite Verte ; Designboom ; Usbek & Rica ; Etapes ; Hi-Fructose ; Cool Hunting ;Epitome.xyz ; Lifo.gr ; The Culture Trip ; Lonely Planet
RESIDENCES | DISTINCTIONS
2024: Résidence Atelier Marcelin, Lorient
2023: Bourse Art Visuel - Jeune Artiste en Bretagne
2023: Jury EESAB Brest
2018: Résidence Initiator, Eleusis 2021
2015: Nominés pour le prix COAL 2015 spécial Océans avec TARA EXPÉDITIONS.
2015: Halsnoy Kloster Residency at the Monastery of Halsnøy, Norway
2015: Prix Jeune Talent, Résidence L’Harponneuse, Grandcamp-Maisy, France
2015: Prix Sperenza, Résidence Fotograficasa, Corse, France
2010: Tokyo Wondersite Residency, Tokyo, Japan
EDUCATION
Hortense Le Calvez
2010-08: Wimbledon College of Arts ( B.A with hons), London
2008-06: Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam
