BIO François Michaud taught drawing and sculpture for many years at the École des beauxarts de Sète in France. He has held artist residencies in Morocco, Greece and Brazil, and his work has been exhibited in Canada, Europe, Mexico and China.
ARTISTIC PRACTICE François Michaud is fascinated by cave paintings and by the Thaïs Bone, a 12,500-year-old artefact and one of the first examples of the notation of passing time. For twenty years he has ritually carved annual poles. His work Barque aux 100 calendriers is an extension of this ritual. It is the very idea of the incomplete work which can be continued by someone else, just like the project Coeurs du Monde, which Michaud has been working on for the past nine years. In this project, taking as his starting point the idea that the world is a living sculpture, he creates installations of sculptures of symbolic hearts.
PROJECT François Michaud’s project is a sculptural installation in multi-coloured wood which notes the concept of time in the form of a calendar. The work consists of a small rudimentary boat in which a chair is placed. One hundred wooden poles of different colours will be placed around this chair. On each pole, 365/366 marks will be made with paint or with notches made with a chisel or a burin. On 100 poles, we will see 36,525 pictorial or sculptural marks. The boat represents the survival and nomadic lives of peoples. Today this craft symbolises the tragic object by means of which, in perilous conditions, refugees migrate. The wooden chair represents the established artistic movements to which we refer to describe passing time. The chair, stationary in the boat and moving on the water, evokes the concept of relativity: the relativity of artistic trends but also that of the observer and the site of observation, such as a shore, a port or another boat.
