Based in Dunkirk and Lille (France), I pursue a sensitive and discreet practice.
Since a residency in Folkestone in 2016, I have been building a close connection with the United Kingdom, where I return regularly to carry out personal projects and collaborate with other artists.

I put the word at the heart of my work, whether written in chalk in public spaces or marked in concrete. My interventions range from the almost imperceptible to the monumental.
I explore what connects us: silence, absence, love…
What I offer to be seen comes from what lives within me. I don’t tell everything. I suggest.

Through sculptures, installations, performances, photographs and videos, I invite the viewer to find their own emotions and personal resonances. I draw from my own experiences, but only share fragments, glimpses that are 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 my work finds meaning.

Background noises is the name I give to the entirety of my practice. Multidisciplinary with romantic-conceptual appearances, my pieces open a contemplative space where each person can engage with the experience they offer and project their own stories into it.

I am not proposing an art of demonstration but 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