Cléa Darnaud
In residence: January - April 2025
Cléa Darnaud is a french drawer and intaglio engraver. In her practice, she uses traditional drawing as well as engraving to develop various illustration and publishing projects. Since 2018, she has completed several artistic residencies in France and abroad, notably in Canada, Finland, Luxembourg and Greenland. Both a moment of life and an artistic material, travel allows her to wander through the accidents of the landscape and daily life in order to collect snippets of memories. Through drawing and writing, she tries to seize these fragments, transformed and interpreted, to reinvest them in a singular graphic form at the service of the imagination. These prints are an invitation to wander between reality and fiction. For several years, her practice of printmaking and drawing has increasingly developed through books. Her interest in writing and storytelling leads her to imagine transdisciplinary projects, halfway between the artist's book and the comic strip. She is currently working on her first comic strip, a graphic novel made in graphite, to be published by Virages Graphiques (Éditions Rivages). Her works have been exhibited in France, Germany, Finland, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Greenland and the United States.
For her residency at Artica Svalbard, Cléa will seek to collect fragments of life in Longyearbyen with the aim of then imagining a book in resonance with the territory and its inhabitants. Whether it is snippets of conversations, objects, landscapes or particular atmospheres, the project will be to create a fiction, halfway between an artist's book and a comic strip, whose story will be intimately linked to life in Svalbard.