she is drawn to unusual and base materials – copper wire, varnish, electrical cables, stones and discarded kitchen utensils – which until relatively recently would not have been thought of as artistic tools, but she is at pains to say that art is not good solely because it uses poor or cheap materials or, conversely, bad just because it uses rich and expensive materials. ‘It’s just in the translation, how you use materials and what you do with them – that is what is interesting,’ she says. ‘This is not restricted to poor countries like those in Africa: in every culture, rich or poor, it’s the way of transforming material that is interesting.’ Trouvé says that she is not particularly interested in the work of artists whose work relies on big production values, such as Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami, but instead finds a closer relationship in the work of someone like Duchamp, in which ‘something small that’s in bronze and because of its relationship with something important and close to you, despite its modesty in scale, it becomes important.’ I point to some chunky, primitivelooking, convoluted sculptures in wood. Trouvé tells me that they have a utilitarian purpose as well as a deco rative one, as they are used as money in Africa. I tell her how beautiful they are and express surprise that they were made for such a utilitarian purpose. ‘Yes, I really love it and the time that it takes to make it. Everything is made by hand,’ she responds. ‘There is the idea of very precious and very poor at the same time – a contradiction, because at the same time that it looks poor, it has a lot of value, because it’s money.’ The analogy reflects much of what Trouvé does with her work. She takes a variety of unpromising materials and manipulates them, and through a sensitive response to the specifics of the surrounding architecture, she
ÇITÕS VERY IMPORTANT TO TAKE SPACE INTO CONSIDERATION AS A MATERIAL, AS PART OF MY WORKÈ creates uncanny environments. An almost alchemical transformation occurs, as these everyday items become loaded with a strange potency. One of her more literal works in her New York Gagosian show was a pair of shoes that were cast in bronze but painted black, so they looked remarkably realistic. Trouvé tells a comic story about a woman collector who was visiting the gallery and, seeing the bronze shoes by the door, thought that removing one’s shoes was a requirement by the artist for viewing the show. The collector took off her shoes, put them next to Trouvé’s work and started to walk through the show in her stockinged feet. One of the sales people from Gagosian came in with another collector and they looked at the collector with no shoes and then at their own feet – everyone was wondering what was appropriate behavior, who was wrong, and disapproving of each other. Trouvé clearly delights in the awkwardness of this situation. After a busy 2010, with shows at Gagosian, the Migros in Zurich, an appearance in the São Paulo Biennial, and a large show at the South London Gallery, Trouvé says that she is relieved to be back in the studio, and plan ning new works. She relishes having the time to meditate on where to take her practice next. ‘It’s a time of concentration,’ she says, ‘when suddenly the ideas come.’ In order to clear the way for discovery, she has cancelled some gallery shows and instead will focus on working towards her museum show. Trouvé makes most of her work herself rather than relying on armies of
assistants and industrial processes. At the moment, she says, she only has one assistant, who works for only two days a week. ‘Even the boring things – repairing things, making holes in leather, and when it’s just manual work which anyone can do, I still like to do it myself,’ she explains. It is in the making, she says, that she makes discoveries, often chang ing her concepts as she goes along. She uses the metaphor of walking along a road – ‘all along you have all the time and the possibility to meet somebody and perhaps change your direction, or even your ideas.’ Her interest in the use of materials is the common thread of all her work, as her drawings, a fundamental part of her work, confirm. In keeping with the consistent expansion of definitions of drawing, she is uncon strained by traditional limitations. Her drawings are a ‘melange of two dimensional and threedimensional elements’, she says. ‘It started first when I was at school. I was doing both sculpture and drawings, both at the same time but in very different ways.’ Even though her drawings and sculp tures relate closely – indeed walking around her installations can feel like entering the space of one of the drawings – she never makes sketches or plans for her sculptural work. Nonetheless, the drawing in progress which she shows me as she takes me into another room of the studio relates closely to the environments she builds in galleries, consisting as it does of copper wire, varnish and other unusual materials. 24
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