Multidisciplinary artist.
Johanna Cabon is a French artist whose work mixes words, sounds, images and sculptures.
Her sculptures in wood and metal are shaped through hammering. Her practice is loud, imperfect and physical. Floating in a landscape of superstition and memory, her work mostly draws inspiration from tradition and the massive wooden furnitures of Brittany, where she was born. They were often carved and studded with nails. Nails, once signifying wealth, were absent in her family home but are at the center of her sculptures today, transforming tradition into a language of repair. Each nail becomes both wound and healing, an intimate exorcism of secret, grief and trauma as a promise to never remain silent again. The act of making is at once ritual and affirmation of existence, inscribing loudly the body’s force into matter.
From this rhythm also arises poetry, carrying visual symbols into words. Together, sculpture and writing form two voices of a single practice and her work unfolds as a series of contemporary icons. Through wood, metal, sounds, images and words, she builds spaces for memory and release.