Violaine BarroisStatement

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fr. Born in 1984, Violaine Barrois is a French visual artist whose practice questions the relationship between humans and the natural world as a lived and transformative experience. Working in Marseille, she explores how landscapes shape our identities, behaviors, and implicit knowledge, while revealing the importance of their emotional value.

Violaine creates inquiry and observation devices that highlight what is present but often overlooked in the environment. By collecting raw materials—rocks, sand, ash, plants—that she transforms into pigments and glazes, she questions and uncovers the invisible layers of these places, inviting a different kind of attention. This methodological approach acts as a tool of revelation, allowing nature to "speak" while actively intervening in it.

She also shares her reflections as a teacher, working in various academic settings in France and internationally. Her projects have been featured in both group and solo exhibitions, including the Design Parade in Toulon (2024), the CAC in Briançon, and the Slovak Design Center in Bratislava (2022).

She is a member of the SOS Durance Vivante collective council and lives in the forest near Aix-en-Provence.

• Dæmonologie

Cove Park, Helensburgh
Scotland

Magnetic 3
Fluxus Art Projects This project draws on the scientific, alchemical, and patriarchal imaginaries of the modern era to question the relationships between power, knowledge, and domination. Inspired by Carolyn Merchant’s writings in The Death of Nature, it explores the sexual and violent metaphors that shaped the mechanistic view of nature, from dissections to laboratory practices. The project seeks to reinvent these metaphors by creating a space where organic and undisciplined processes—fermentation, erosion, transformation—regain their autonomy.

The work, whose title echoes the book by James VI of Scotland on witchcraft, takes the form of a ceramic installation accompanied by a publication. Scotland, with its historical controversies over witch trials and its Gaelic mythological narrative of the Cailleach, the goddess of cold seasons and creator of landscapes, provides fertile ground for reexamining these narratives.

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• La Mer Pourpre
• Étang de Berre 
• Laboratoire Plastique Pamparigouste
• Bureau des Guides GR2013

In collaboration with:
GIPREB (Groupement d’Intérêt Public pour la Réhabilitation de l’Étang de Berre)
Institut Écocitoyen pour la Connaissance des Pollutions
INRAE Montpellier
Chrome Laboratory, University of Nîmes

This project involves the extraction of Tyrian purple dye from Rapana venosa, inspired by the work of Inge Boesken Kanold, a painter and specialist in the rare, ancient, and lost color of purple. 
Plastic and invasive exotic species represent a form of intrusion into natural ecosystems. Plastic, ubiquitous in oceans and on coasts, has become an inescapable component of marine and terrestrial environments. It infiltrates species' life cycles and, by fragmenting into microplastics, integrates into the trophic network. Both forms of pollution—chemical and biological—often follow pathways shaped by human activities. For instance, the discharge of ballast water from ships introduced Rapana venosa (a species native to Japan) into the Étang de Berre.
 
By linking the visibility of plastic to an invasive exotic species rather than a heritage species (like turtles or seals), this approach seeks to resolve the tension between a sacralized vision of nature, often detached from the tangible realities of the world, and the biophysical dynamics in which we operate. It repositions humans within a process of renewal and invention, adapting to the ever-changing constraints of the environment, while restoring nature’s active role in our shared future.

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Géorésonances                        
Port-Cros National Park

In collaboration with Tom Sidaine, environmental philosopher and researcher

Fort du Pradeau, sept 2025

Immersed for five weeks in the heart of the Port-Cros National Park, off the coast of her hometown of Hyères, the artist explored the relationships we maintain with our environment and proposed a re-evaluation of these connections. How can we, as a species, listen to and respect these landscapes that shape us just as much as we transform them?

Barrois employed her distinctive methodological approach, gathering raw materials—rocks, plants, ash—along with ancestral local practices and knowledge tied to the application of pigments and dyes. She integrates these elements into her work to uncover the invisible layers of the territory.

This approach underscores the importance of reinvesting in our sensory and emotional relationships with the landscape, viewing it not as a mere backdrop, but as a living entity with which we must coexist.