Through his ritual performance, Lille-based artist, Fred Martin, who has been travelling the world for the past twenty-five years, immerses participants’ faces in a bath of clay to form a plaster copy that is then exhibited in a monumental installation composed of all the casts. This artistic ceremony functions as both a rebirth and a revelation, with masks that do not conceal but rather reveal the most minute and intimate details of a face, in an authentic experience based on sharing and bringing people together around a magnificent common work of art.
BIOGRAPHY
> FRED MARTIN (France)
Born in 1969 in Lille, where he still lives and works, Fred Martin has a DNSEP degree in artistic expression from the École des Beaux-Arts in Tourcoing and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Lille. He does sculpture, photography, performance, drawing and printmaking. He cultivates a direct relationship with nature, the countryside and the human body, and follows a land art approach using wood and earth for his various projects (L’Odyssée, the monumental willow branch sculptures of Inanimatu, etc.). His first long trips to Canada, Alaska, and South India gave him a taste for travel that he still pursues with his various site-specific installations and sculptures (in India, Senegal, South Korea, Burkina Faso, Europe and throughout France). In 1999, he began developing the principle of Baptêmes de terre, a performance installation and participatory ritual in which the texture of clay is used to reveal, and intimacy, authenticity and our relationships with others serve as the material for a deeply humanistic piece.
DISTRIBUTION
Fred Martin (création, conception, réalisation)
