Maud Gourdon (b. 1991, France) is a visual artist based in Brussels, who work predominantly with drawing, writing and sculpture.
Gourdon's practice has evolved from a fascination for language as an inexhaustible material of transmutation — from the spoken word to its graphic representation, subsequent readings and potential meanings — to a reflection on using language for creating visual and spatial narratives. These narratives take the form of installations composed of publications, texts, drawings and sculptures.
Gourdon's clear-line drawings, drawn in the style of popular images such as comic strips, illuminated manuscript, decorative patterns, logotypes and explanatory schemes, can be read very easily but always convey a certain unease. The images slide with humor and lightness from one meaning to another, forever held in tension between different interpretations.
She applies a similar process to spoken and written language. She likes to play with the confusion and collision of sounds and meanings.
Conceptually, her installations always result from intimate stories and objects that she wraps into wordplay, line-play and multiple forms. Her narratives are coursing through history and traditions searching for possible connections — through analogy, homophony, homography, coincidence, slip of the pen or tongue — in order to gather materials to create present day fictions.
