Video art by Nicolas Laborie and music by Martin A. Smith in connection to “Sentiments Déshabillés” an art book with wet plate collodion photography and haiku poetry by Nicolas Laborie.
SENTIMENTS DÉSHABILLÉS by Nicolas Laborie is a wet plate collodion series featuring nude figures and botanical studies about the language of flowers and plants linked to the human condition.
Flowers and plants are at the centre of every human experience.
Flowers play such an important part in our daily lives: We grow, we give, we nurture, we flourish…they are us.
We express ourselves with them.
They dance together as their perfume invites us to their touch and hypnotises us like adored lovers to hand pick them, water them, nurture them, to give them away for love, for a kiss or a tear.
This 19th century photographic process, wet plate collodion, has a deep rooted connection with botanicals: In 1851, collodion, a binding agent made from cotton was invented for photographic purposes. To close the botanical circle, each plate is varnished with sandarac, a resin from a cypress-like tree, tetraclinis articulata and lavender.
During the Victorian era, flowers and plants were used to communicate, allowing secretive messages to be sent as the Victorian etiquette deemed it unacceptable to share openly. The language of flowers was more than a simple meaning of a gift but a deeper understanding of the human conditions for love, forgiveness, rejection and sadness.
The chemical reactions on the figures and botanicals evoke ethereal memories of my love for the Japanese poetry Haiku which became popular in 19th Century Europe. A short conscious Japanese art form, Haiku is created with the capture of a single movement, emotions and essence of a specific moment in time beyond nature by wondering traveling artists and imagists in the victorian times where patience is key.
In flowers
I seek refuge
and in the darkroom a sanctuary.