It is childhood summers spent in Brittany that pushes François Dumas to make a tribute to the marine world. Inspired by the shape and the movement of the anemones, he went back and forth between painting and sculpting, each practice feeding the other.
Anemone Rug
Edition La Chance, 2012
It all started with painting and finding the good size of paint brush which would enable the hand to run freely in a harmonic gesture that was then repeated over and over again in order to obtain a rich pattern. Starting from the centre of the paper, the hand was guiding the brush in a dynamic choreography as the strokes expanded outwards. The overlapping layers of paint created rich nuances and transparencies.
Dumas values having a hand in production and maintaining a physical contact with his creations.
The paintings were noticed by the Parisian publisher Edition La Chance who proposed to translate the paintings into rugs.
The blue, green and red rugs handmade by artisans in Portugal are each composed with 4 tones of colours creating depths and movement.
Anemone Basket
Limited Edition, 2011
Dumas already sees a container in sea anemones as they eat what dares to venture in their tentacles. It was only naturally that the sculpting process led him to make a bowl that imprisons what it contains. Flexible plastic profiles of a predefined size are bent and welded together into long stripes of repeated branches. The stripe is then belted around a stone piece forming a circular ruff. The branches can be stretched to fill up the container and come back to their initial position in a slow organic movement.
