Laure LEDOUX
Kiap
To 15 February
Kiap
The result of an Artist Residency in picto-charentais on the theme of “ women’s sports in rural areas”, this exhibition offers a visual approach combining several photographic techniques and textile creation. Over the course of a year, Laure Ledoux met women practicing a wide range of sports, from amateur to top-level. From mermaiding to para-archery, from SuperKop-Ter supporters to rowers, she presents the committed practices of these women through a colorful, offbeat vision.
This project has been awarded the “Cultural Olympiad” label as part of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Practical info
Through a project born of the photographic residency entitled “women’s sport in rural areas”, my research is rooted in a profound questioning of the body, identity, and the material that dresses and embodies these multiple realities.
With KIAP, clothing becomes much more than a simple outfit: it is an additional skin, an extension of the self, bearing the memory of the exchanges and experiences shared with each sportswoman I meet. For each model, I created a unique garment from fabrics onto which I transferred our discussions using photographic techniques such as cyanotype, making emotions and stories visible.
These fabrics, which become garments, are vibrant surfaces, a terrain where the intimate and the collective meet, where each person’s territory takes shape in a common aesthetic.
I conceive the final photograph as the result of these different strata of the creative process (the model’s body, the garment made, the photographic print). Different strata that compose a new vision of sport and a new territory of the body.
This project is an exploration of the sensitive link between photography and matter, a fusion where each garment is considered a photograph in itself. The photographic image is no longer limited to the print, but is worn, touched and felt. Fascinated by textures and materiality, I weave into my work an interaction between ancient technologies and contemporary, artisanal manufacturing techniques. In this way, I question photography itself: not just as an image, but as a medium that unfolds, envelops and modifies the body.
The exhibition route offers an immersive experience, a journey in which each garment becomes part of a visual investigation into the diversity of sports and the women who practice them.
KIAP – the liberating cry of taekwondo – resonates here as a symbol of power, emancipation and cohesion. By offering a hybrid reading of the body and sport, this exhibition reflects identities in motion, revealed through the encounter between photography, couture and storytelling. KIAP celebrates a new vision of the body, a reinvented territory, where each layer of creation – from the garment to the final photograph – tells a possible story. Laure Ledoux
Guided tours
Whether you’re on your own, with friends or family, the guided tours offered by the Villa Pérochon’s mediation team are there to guide and enlighten you about the photographers’ approaches. Come and enjoy a convivial moment at the foot of the works!
These tours are free and open to all. Reservations recommended by e-mail or telephone.
Biography
Laure Ledoux was born in Niort and lives and works in Paris. She studied at the École Supérieure d’Art et Céramique in Tarbes, and is a graduate of the École Européenne Supérieure de l’Image (Poitiers, 2008) and the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP, Arles, 2012).
Her work has been awarded prizes such as the Bourse Impulsion from the city of Rouen and the Bourse d’Aide à la Création from the Conseil Général des Hauts-de-France, among others. Laure has been invited for residencies at La Capsule in Le Bourget, where she has been running a project since 2022, at the Centre Art et Photographie de Lectoure in 2016/2017 she was resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2014/2015, at the Université de Haute Alsace and the Kunsthalle de Mulhouse as well as at the Centre d’art contemporain de Pontmain in 2014. Her presence in other more or less atypical creative venues such as high schools, colleges and prisons has enabled her to create with the young people she works with in these establishments. She is a laureate of the 2023/2024 Artist Residency program at La Villa Pérochon in Niort, where she is continuing her research on the textile image.
Her work is based on the photographic image, and unfolds with portraiture in a questioning of self-transcendence and the resistance of the body. She regularly works with athletes and people who push the limits of their bodies. In an intermediate, post-exertion state, the body is reexamined, offering us another space to invent and conquer. Laure’s portraits reveal faces, bodies, conquests and utopias, prompting us to re-interrogate norms.
Her relationship with photography is tactile, linked to the material at every stage of the image’s construction. Laure questions notions of introspection and contemplation through moments of disruption, encouraging us to free ourselves from the codes of representation.