Based in Dunkirk and Lille (France), I develop a practice that connects the intimate and the collective.
Following a residency in Folkestone in 2016, I have developed a strong connection with the United Kingdom, where I regularly return to pursue personal projects and collaborate with other artists.

At the core of my practice is language, whether written in chalk in public space or inscribed in concrete. My interventions range from the almost imperceptible to the monumental.
I explore what connects us: lived experience, the sensory, shared spaces…
What I bring into view emerges from within. I don’t reveal everything, I suggest.

Working across sculpture, installation, performance, photography and video, I invite viewers to find personal resonances and emotions. I draw from my own experience but share only fragments, large enough for each person to find something of themselves. A different way of being in the world, through writing and the sensory, grounded in the conviction that the intimate, when lightly evoked, can become universal.
It is in this space, between the intimate and the shared, that my work finds meaning.

Background noises is the name I give to my overall practice. Multidisciplinary, with conceptual and romantic overtones, it opens a space for contemplation in which each viewer can engage with the work and project their own experience onto it.

I do not seek to create demonstrative art, but art of resonance.


Élodie Merland

“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