A tireless globetrotter, Elsa Guillaume develops an artistic world nourished by her travels all over the world. On her journeys, what is at stake every time is the discovery of the new world which fills her notebooks and sketchbooks. As an heir to Jules Verne more than Levi-Strauss, her work resembles oneiric and phantasmagoric ethnography. The stories told by her graphic or plastic creations oscillate between reverie and bluntness, even verging on cruelty (anthropophagy, dissections), but that she always tackles with humor and lightness. Her work is a tentacular comic strip whose characters escape the frames to take shape in ceramics and translate the lighthearted look that she takes at the oddity of the world, the richness of the seabed or of exotics jungles.

IMMERGÉ
A constellation of human hands and heads, of water lilies and fish heads is floating on the surface of the ground. Nothing is left to chance in the disposition of the elements composing this strange swamp: the typologies assemble to form a complex network of lines, squares and diamonds. A geometric order is unquestionably at work here. Is it some kind of three dimensional Buddhist mandala, a Navajo sand painting, or even some geoglyph like the ones the Nazca people drew on the ground in Peru? The space which is represented changes scale and becomes a landscape, a map or a miniature model of an imaginary island whose summits are crowned by war trophies (maybe the head of an enemy speared on top of a mast as a sign of property, or a display of wealth linked to vegetation or fishing...). The human characters, halfway immersed in the water, with their eyes closed, progressively disappear towards the depths and bring down with them the memory of a land full of mystery. With this porcelain archipelago, Elsa Guillaume expresses her taste for the aquatic world, its inhabitants be they alive or dead, the wonderful and at the same time troubling universe of unknown islands, which is also to be found in the shape of sea urchins when comes the time of the autopsy (Triple Oursinade) as well as that of a giant squid ritually chopped by natives of the Amazon (Spineless Squid). There is no smooth sailing on Elsa Guillaume's ocean; quite the opposite actually: it is spangled with all sorts of fish, mollusks, conquistadors, islands and indigenous cultures.

SUCCULENTE
The same way one hangs out the washing or salted meat, Elsa Guillaume hangs pieces of human meat: hands, feet, cut fingers make for appetizing garlands for cannibals who store their meat products on the lines of uncommon folding screens. As for the bouquet garni, it includes pieces of cactus, yucca leaves, among other exotic species which reveal that the scene takes place somewhere between the jungle and the desert. The three screens form a shack in which the artist invites the viewer to penetrate. What does this setting mean? Are we in the place of worship of an uncivilized population for which the severed limbs represent some sort of apotropaic protection, of offering, or of ex voto? Where have the remains of the human bodies gone? Is it a warning from the cannibals to the lost explorer? By way of a fragmented scarecrow, Elsa Guillaume literally fleshes out porcelain. Through the action of fire, which, in cookery as well as in ceramics, is a way to make out the raw from the cooked, the white mixture turns into inanimate bodies which come to life and swing on threads, in between life and death, the ritual and the feast.

Because food assumes a particular significance for the artist and fuels her ceramic work, Elsa Guillaume's travel notebooks are filled with all kinds of culinary discoveries (Guatemalan peaches, Brazilian pancakes, Japanese sushi, etc...). It is no wonder then, that the sacrificial practices of the Maya people, or the cannibalism of the Tupinambá, feed her artistically voracious mind.

Among the images that she reinvents are the engravings of the illustrator of the Age of Discovery Théodore de Bry (1528-1598), which particularly resonate with Succulente. From the scenes of cannibalism in Brazil to the Spanish abuses on indigenous people, the artist from Liège revealed the cruelty of the European colonization of the Americas, by taking inspiration from travel narratives. Elsa Guillaume, fascinated by the human barbecues as drawn by the 16th century humanist, cuts life into pieces. Her taste for sampling into the living matter, as illustrated by a game of cutting and dissecting, is regularly expressed in her ceramics such as Monticule, a ray outfit with cut out wings, or Pinnules, a collection of bloody pieces of red tuna. The artist seems to be searching for the complexity and the immensity of the world inside the living body, by sticking her hands deep into the flesh.