Based in Dunkirk and Lille (France), Élodie Merland develops a sensitive and discreet practice. Since a residency in Folkestone in 2016, she has built a close connection with the United Kingdom, where she returns regularly to carry out personal projects and collaborate with other artists.
Élodie Merland places words at the heart of her work, whether written in chalk in public spaces or marked in concrete. Her interventions oscillate between the almost imperceptible to the monumental. She explores what connects us: silence, absence, love… What she offers to be seen comes from what lives within her. She does not tell everything. She suggests.
Through sculptures, installations, performances, photographs and videos, Élodie Merland invites the viewer to find their own emotions and personal resonances. She draws from her own experiences, but only shares fragments, glimpses that remain open enough for anyone to find a piece of themselves within. A way of inhabiting the world differently, through writing and sensitivity, with the belief that what is deeply personal when gently touched upon can become universal. It is in this space, between the intimate and the shared, that her work finds meaning.
Background noises is the name she gives to the entirety of her practice. Multidisciplinary with romantic-conceptual overtones, it opens up a space for contemplation where everyone can take hold of the experience offered and project their own experience onto it.
Élodie Merland does not propose an art of demonstration but an art of resonance.
“From 2009 to 2010, every Sunday for an hour, the artist Élodie Merland opened her gallery by appointment, located each time in a different district of one of the cities where she lived: Dunkirk and Toulon. A gallery of about one square meter, including a wired telephone. A phone box...” Read more
“While walking around a street corner, a word would hold our attention. A quiet intervention would disturb us discretly. We would encounter without knowing an artwork of Élodie Merland...” Read more