RESIDENCY
Mélinda Fourn
Artist
29.05.2023 - 11.07.2023
Selected resident from our Open Call - Session #1
Melinda Fourn (b. 1995) is a French-Beninese artist who lives and works in Paris. Her art is expressed mainly through sculpture, often integrated into her installations by a series of photographs or digital objects. She is particularly interested in the creation of jewelry and functional everyday objects, which for the artist are sculptures in their own right, charged with stories, memories and meanings. Appropriating the shapes of these objects - from pots to stoves - she reworks their form, reverses their function, subverts their use, while adorning them like jewels.
During her residency at Selebe Yoon, Melinda pursues her research into the porous link between craft and art, drawing on the know-how specific to the region. She combines metal and ceramics by working on welding and assembly techniques, different from forging, with her faithful companions: the anvil and the hammer. Drawing on her travels throughout West Africa, she combines these two mediums with her poems, which reveal her encounter with the material, and digital images, which bear witness to the creative process.
Residency video
Biography
© Morel Donou. Courtesy of Selebe Yoon, Dakar
Born in 1995, Mélinda Fourn is a multidisciplinary artist of Franco-Beninese origin. She currently lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2021 and did an exchange program at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana (2020).
Her art is mainly expressed through sculpture, which is often integrated into her installations through a series of photographs. In addition to these two mediums, Mélinda Fourn explores the field of jewelry. Echoing her memories and mobilizing the learnings made during her travels, the jewel is apprehended as a sculpture in its own right. Like the Haïku in poetry, the miniature scale of the jewel rhymes with synthesis: it is a condensed art which, while employing the know-how and techniques of sculpture, imposes to take into account the ornamental end which constitutes the essence of the object. She has been selected for the Biso Biennale in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in 2023.
She has participated in several group exhibitions: "Diversi-T" at Kosmokey, La Cité Fertile, Pantin, FR (2023); "Intention", Azz-Art, Paris FR (2022); "Pièce, Habitation, Abri..." at the Musée Delacroix, Paris, FR (2022); "Restitution" at the Institut Français, Saint Louis, SN (2022); "100% l'Expo", La Vilette, France (2022), among others. She has had several residencies including Villa Saint-Louis Ndar (2022); ArtMéssiamé in Lomé, Togo (2021); Green Patch Ceramics, La Borne in France (2021) and Casa Lü, Ttlaplan, Mexico (2019).