The Intricate Cardboard Worlds of Eva Jospin
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| Eva Jospin working on Promenade(s) for Maison Ruinart. Image from Ignant . |
Well, this one really is cardboard! (Unlike my last blog post .) I am mesmerised by the work of French sculptor Eva Jospin. She takes something so ordinary and transforms it, layer by layer, into dense forests, crumbling architecture, caves and imaginary landscapes that feel ancient, mysterious and slightly unreal.
Up close, the corrugated edges become bark, stone and tangled undergrowth. Step back and the material almost disappears completely. I love that contradiction: cardboard is everyday and disposable, but Jospin somehow makes it feel monumental.
Forests, ruins and imaginary landscapes
Forests and architecture appear again and again in Jospin's work, sometimes so entwined that it becomes difficult to tell where one finishes and the other begins.
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| Cénotaphe (Grande chapelle), 2020. Image via This is Colossal . |
In 2016 she created Panorama for the Cour Carrée at the Louvre, an immersive circular landscape that visitors could actually step inside. Then there is Cénotaphe, first shown at the Abbey of Montmajour in 2020, where columns, ruins and creeping vegetation seem to have grown together.
There is something so wonderfully archaeological about it all. These aren't simply models of forests or buildings, they feel like places with histories of their own. It reminds me a little of Edoardo Tresoldi's ghostly architectural ruins, which I wrote about in Creating a Ruin over on the Pickle Journal.
I first came across Jospin's work through Ignant and her project for Maison Ruinart, Promenade(s). The landscape of Champagne was a perfect subject for her. She looked at the Montagne de Reims almost as a cross-section, from vines and roots above ground to the chalk quarries and cellars below, building the landscape up through different geological and imagined layers.
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| Selva, exhibition at Museo Fortuny, Venezia. Photo by Benoît Fougeirol . |
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| Eva at work creating one of her intricate drawings. Image by Laure Vasconi via Ignant. |
The geography of Jospin's work is something I find very appealing. She talks about seeing things in stratification and layers, and says that this is how she builds her imagination. You really can see that in the work. Nothing feels flat. Your eye keeps travelling deeper into it.
It's fascinating stuff. Jospin says, "With my artworks, I don't tell a story. I create a world in which the story takes place and lives."
Beyond cardboard
Although cardboard is the material she is best known for, Jospin's work moves into drawing and embroidery too.
Chambre de soie is perhaps the most extraordinary example. Originally created for Dior's Autumn-Winter 2021-2022 Haute Couture show, Jospin's drawings were transformed into a vast embroidered landscape by the artisans of the Chanakya ateliers in Mumbai. It was later shown at the Château de Versailles, where the forests, architecture and winding vegetation seem completely at home.
Changing from earthy cardboard to richly coloured thread might sound like a huge leap, but somehow it isn't. The same world is still there: arches, forests, hidden paths, ruins and slightly fantastical landscapes.
I think that is what makes these works so compelling. They don't tell you what has happened, or what is about to happen. They create the setting and leave the rest to you.
Lovely work that makes you feel a little like an archaeologist, discovering hidden worlds, or as though you are lost in a storybook, gingerly stepping deeper and deeper into the woods. I think I would be quite happy to get lost there.
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| Details of Galleria . Image from This is Colossal. |
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