La Respiration des pierres (The Breathing of Stones), 2009

La Respiration des pierres (The Breathing of Stones), 2009

La Respiration des pierres is a hand-drawn animation produced through the repeated tracing of a single stone. I first draw its outline, then trace that drawing, before tracing the new version in turn. As the operation continues, minute inaccuracies introduced by the hand are carried into each subsequent image and gradually amplified.

When the drawings are animated, the apparently inert form begins to expand, contract and appear to breathe. The movement is neither added afterwards nor planned in advance: it emerges directly from the accumulation of deviations generated by the process itself. As my first explicitly process-based work, La Respiration des pierres marks an early shift in my practice from producing a predetermined image towards establishing a procedure and observing what it makes possible.

Video documentation of La Respiration des pierres, a hand-drawn animation in which successive tracings gradually transform the outline of a stone into a breathing form.