Violaine Fayolle

The Interview : Violaine Fayolle

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Violaine Fayolle, an artist based in France. Between engraving and metamorphosis, Violaine Fayolle’s work conjures a world of shifting identities — half-human, half-creature, always in transformation. From the tactile intimacy of woodcut to the alchemical process of ceramics, her practice gathers fragments of matter and myth into a cabinet of wonders where curiosity itself becomes a mode of survival. A member of the Jeune Gravure Contemporaine in Paris, curator of the “Morsure #2” exhibition at Archipel de Fouesnant, and now General Secretary of the National Printmaking Federation, Fayolle continues to weave connections between gesture, community, and the imaginary. In 2023, she received the Fondalor patronage prize for a public art project soon to take root in a tree-lined square — a permanent encounter between art and landscape.

Here, she reflects on hybridity, curiosity, and the silent stories that dwell within matter.

Hi Violaine, thank you for taking time out to talk with The Wise Owl about your creativity and art.

RS: Your work moves fluidly between engraving, sculpture, and ceramics — materials that require touch, patience, and resistance. How do you know when a form demands to be cut into wood rather than shaped in clay? How do you decide which medium best conveys a particular narrative or emotion?

VF: Above all, I seek to create an emotion, a sensation, in those who view the works, to touch the audience through the visual senses, beyond words. I believe that each medium has a different impact, and I am found of everything that can be seen or touched; I mean textures, materials, and mediums. In the two dimensions of wood engraving, I can create illusions of space that allow me to open up an imagination that goes beyond what the material — constrained by the physical laws of gravity, weight, and force — can offer. I choose a medium for what it allows me to imagine and evoke in the eyes of the spectator. Woodcut, for example, induces a raw aesthetic, but also, when I practice it intensely, it leads me, through the constraints it imposes, to reflect on ideas that would never have been born if I had worked with another medium.

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So, the idea for my forest, woodcuts using lost plates that go from darkness to light, came to me as a result of working with the medium of woodcut. Only this medium and the very strong constraints associated with this technique in this project allowed me to create this work. In terms of volume, I have many more technical constraints related to physics (gravity, material, etc.), but this gives the works a disturbing presence that is more explicit and concrete than in two dimensions. Also, in choosing porcelain as the material for the volume, I sought to bring delicacy to a proposal that is quite raw in substance. Each choice of material will have an effect, and I am very sensitive to this. For a new idea, I look for the right medium and practice with it as long as necessary. At the moment, I am training myself in the creation of moulds for volume, in order to continue exploring the direction I have recently taken in the creation of the installation Les grands Anciens.  (The great Elders, moulded porcelain pieces lit from within.

RS: Since 2014, you’ve created hybrid beings.  These hybrid forms blur boundaries between human, animal, and object — what draws you to these transformations, and what do they reveal about human complexity today?

VF: Human beings like to simplify and to caricature everything, and I seek to offer a complex visual universe that disrupts this Manichean and reductive perception of the world. I am tired of these unilateral thoughts that do not accept debate or disagreement. Humans are paradoxical. Nature, of which we are a part, has no particular intention; it is content to simply be. I seek to show viewers this richness all around them and the complexity of human beings. We are animals. Different from other animals, of course, but we are animals with urges that we would like to reject but which exist. It is a question of going through the animal and hybridisation to see humans differently and question them about what they are.

RS: Your universe evokes the ancient Wunderkammer, where wonder, science, and myth once coexisted. What does the cabinet of curiosity mean to you today — a relic of past fascination, or a living metaphor for the complexity of our inner worlds?

VF: The creation of my own cabinet of curiosities is a daily practice deeply connected to the intimate: every day, I observe the pictorial richness that nature offers to inspire me, to draw from it and use it as raw material, as visual nourishment. This has been my daily routine for years. And even if it comes from a historically dated practice, the cabinet of curiosities created by someone traces the path and twists and turns that their life may have taken, the objects that their eyes have encountered and loved. It is within everyone's reach to open their eyes to the world around them. Whether our environment is rural or urban, insects always find a place to nest in our living space, whether it be spiders with their velvety legs or woodlice with their ingeniously arranged plates forming their exoskeleton. A patch of sky or night sky always teaches us about colours. Everything can become a source of wonder. I can be fascinated by a nightjar or a moray eel because I find them repulsive and this repulsion makes me question myself. So I try to draw them. It's the same with humans and their reactions, which I always observe with a little distance and curiosity. I like this idea of a living metaphor for the complexity of our inner worlds. This approach to drawing nature has become so important in my work that I wanted to feature it in the scenography of my latest solo exhibition, to also show the nourishment and genesis of imagination. This gave rise to the installation called Le curieux atelier (The Curious Workshop).

RS: Melchior, Guy, and other enigmatic figures appear throughout your work, like emissaries from an unknown mythology. Who are they to you — alter egos, companions, or mirrors of collective memory?

VF: These characters are made up of elements sketched from nature, and they are all different. Some, like Melchior, come from a flower such as the hibiscus, following a commission based on this flower. Others, like Guy  , who is actually my father, are real people from my circle whom I have metaphorically transformed into characters who feature in the story I am telling. I worked on Guy based on the tree. My surname, inherited from my father, Fayolle, means ‘place planted with beech trees’, and my father devoted his life to plants and landscape design. Sometimes, I represent myself. Alter egos, of course, companions who also accompany me, and also mirrors of animals/humanoids that can echo emotions and experiences felt by the viewer. Ultimately, they are there to show a variety of specimens, all unique, but apparently belonging to the same species. That's what fascinates me about living beings: a similar matrix unites us, but it is so complex that we are all unique and different.

RS: In curating Morsure #2, you invited artists to explore printmaking. How did this experience shape your own perception of engraving ?

VF: This curatorial work had a major impact on my perception of engraving and my understanding of my own work, even though it was not on display. The commission from the exhibition venue required a diverse range of proposals, and I created a link around the theme of metamorphosis between humans and animals. As a self-taught wood engraver, this forced me to open my eyes to other techniques with which I was unfamiliar: copperplate engraving, medieval-style stencil illumination, mezzotint... and this led me to a more subtle perception. I also invited several wood engravers who became friends. The encounters that this curatorship has enabled have opened me up to other ways of working, other areas of research in printmaking, some of which have had such an impact on my own work that they still influence the direction I may wish to take today.

RS:  As General Secretary of the National Printmaking Federation, you are at the crossroads of tradition and innovation. How do you see engraving evolving in an age saturated with screens and instant images? How do you envision supporting the next generation of printmakers in a rapidly digitalizing art world?

VF: This question is at the heart of some of our reflections at Manifestampe. First of all, multiples allow us to create unique works at low cost for an audience that appreciates handmade work, not necessarily collectors, who find there a way to begin in art acquisition. Digital images are not incompatible with printmaking, quite the contrary. Tradition is not opposed to innovation. I also use digital technology in my images on a daily basis. But the physical act of engraving, where I struggle with the wood, is a time of necessary concentration and is precisely different from the time spent on the computer, where everything can be recorded and evolved infinitely. The gouge engraves the wood and mistakes cannot be repaired. This tension is valuable and a source of great creativity. The constraints it imposes are fertile. The young generation of engravers, which Manifestampe has been supporting for two years with a young artists' prize, is encouraged to integrate digital printmaking with physical matrix and printing techniques. Manifestampe seeks to give greater visibility to printmaking and to popularise knowledge of this relatively unknown medium among a wider audience. Today, as images are so easy to create digitally and duplicate through reprographic, printmaking is evolving, as are the issues addressed by artists. It is turning towards monoprints, unique works, and towards the experimentation offered by combining different matrices. Finally, matrices can be used, as wood engraver Roby Comblain does, as material for installations. This is one of the directions I am also taking.

RS: The Fondalor award has led you toward a permanent outdoor installation. How does creating for a shared, outdoor space alter your relationship with audience and permanence? Did it shape your creative process in any way?

VF: Creating for a public outdoor space shared by everyone has given my work a lot of meaning, because I believe that artists have a role to play. And even more in this case, where the works were created through a participatory process involving around seventy residents from all social environments. I wonder about the place of the artist in society and the role they should play in this society where everything is tense, where everyone is turning in on themselves, where relationships with others are closing down. What is their place in society if they spend their whole life creating alone in their studio, without any connection to their audience of collectors, an elite managed by their gallery owners? For my part, I seek encounters around my work and what it shows others. Of course, creating for other people and identifying them opens a new creative process. In this project, I offered the residents two different installations, one that I preferred, which was more of a contemporary work of art to be contemplated, and another that was more playful. The more playful one received the most votes, particularly because several children had participated in the project and were very attached to it. It became La ribambelle [Violaine 8] (the string of). It makes a lot of sense to me that the project the residents preferred is the one that was installed.

RS:  You often speak of “opening new narratives” about human complexity. If your oeuvre were a story, what chapter are you writing now — and what questions remain unanswered for you?

VF: At the moment, I am developing those narratives towards a more intimate atmospheres, exploring ideas that aim to reach as wide an audience as possible, a process I began with my great Elders. I am trying to go back to prehistoric times, to those first artists, to touch on the foundation that everyone carries within them, the heirs of a past that maybe we don’t really understand. So this would be a chapter that goes back even further than the two or three generations I have tried to show so far? I have thousands of unanswered questions! I try to answer them a little by working, by creating. And so, for now, I'm focusing on the ones I'm working on. How can we touch everyone through the feelings about our connections with the ancient, the antiquity, the Neolithic?

RS: Any advice for upcoming artists?

VF: When I meet with aspiring artists, I always have lots of advice to give them, which I have learned late in life: to have confidence in themselves and feel legitimate; to understand what it really means to be an artist, far from the pure idea of art for art's sake, but in the actual reality of a society with its taxes and economic rules, which artists never want to hear about. I want to talk to them about the role they can play in connecting and meeting people, which I find perhaps the most spiritually nourishing thing of all. I also tell them to seek constructive criticism, which should not destroy them but nourish them so they can always move forward (taking care to choose the people from whom they seek this criticism). Finally, I tell them that the path is long and rich, strewn with many disappointments, but that it is important to create what they need to create for themselves, with the greatest possible freedom and openness, without changing their intentions to fit a demand from the others. Finally, I always ask other artists whose careers are more advanced than mine what advice they could give me. And so, the tradition continues...

Thank you for talking with The Wise Owl. We wish you the very best for your upcoming exhibitions this year and hope that they will be a great success.

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