Based in Dunkirk and Lille (France), I am developing a practice that connects the personal and the collective.
Since a residency in Folkestone in 2016, I have built a close connection with the United Kingdom, where I return regularly to carry out personal projects and collaborate with other artists.

I place words at the heart of my work, whether written in chalk in public spaces or marked in concrete. My interventions oscillate between the almost imperceptible and the monumental.
I explore what connects us: the lived, the sensitive, shared spaces…
What I offer to be seen comes from what lives within me. I do not 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 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 conviction that the intimate, when merely touched upon, can become universal..
It is in this space, between the intimate and the common, that my work finds meaning.

Background noises is the name I give to the entirety of my 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 live onto it.

I do not propose an art of demonstration but an 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