Hyacinthe descended from the tree, Séverine Hubard, 2010 [destroyed]

Douglas fir frame (13x13cm), screws, lag bolts, acacia dowels, 10 PVC windows (126x77cm) diameter: 4.4m/ height: 4.2m *work no longer on the itinerary. burnt on 23 June 2018 to mark the opening of the 10th edition of the Quinzaine radieuse.

This piece was created with the Compagnons du bois for the exhibition Poetically inhabiting the world at the Musée d'art moderne, contemporain et d'art brut in Lille. Composed of a wooden framework and ten PVC skylights, this poetic work has an immediate relationship with its environment (an emerging housing estate)... A graduate of the Beaux Arts in Dunkirk and Nantes, Séverine Hubard (born in Lille in 1977, an artist whose work is highly versatile: photography, videos, performance, sculpture) is presenting an ambiguous piece in Piacé.

Hyacinth down from the tree lies on the borderline between sculpture and architecture, reflecting a central question in the artist's work: the presentation and representation of space and volume, which she approaches more as a 'builder' than as a sculptor. Séverine Hubard prefers to work in residence rather than in her permanent studio, and seeks direct contact with the environment in which her works are inserted, in the manner of an architect. Hyacinthe .... (first created for the Amiens museum) in Piacé establishes a strong dialogue between the walnut tree under which it is installed and the surrounding suburban area, thanks to the materials of which it is made - a Douglas fir timber frame and 10 PVC skylights - and which make a direct reference to urban planning. Séverine Hubard worked with the Compagnons du bois, a company made up of carpenters, to create the structure, which is assembled using a peg system.

This highly orthogonal construction, based on the geometric shape of the decagon, evokes the partly utopian research of Russian Constructivist architects of the 1920s and 30s, but she does not attribute any functionality to it. The artist sees his work as "a nest at the foot of a tree inside which you find yourself on the outside"; a structure that is at once welcoming, reassuring and open to the surrounding landscape, blurring the most basic architectural codes of "outside" and "inside" through the use of windows that open onto nothing and become the only partitions in this hut.

In this way, Hyacinthe comes close to the sculptures of the artist Richard Deacon, in which wood and emptiness are two fundamental 'materials'. Even more than a platform or a tree house, this work with its multiple faceted profiles evokes the geometrical figures in space that people liked to elaborate in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or the cutting of a precious stone. The title itself is not innocent: both absurd and poetic, it reminds us that beyond its materiality, Séverine Hubard's work has a humorous and, in this case, poetic dimension: "Hyacinthe" evokes both the Greek mythological character metamorphosed into a flower and the variety of zircon of the same name. Through this strange nest with its changing contours, Séverine Hubard introduces a deviance into the normality of the surrounding dwellings and renews our view of everyday architecture.

Text by Roma Lambert