SCULPTURE/LANDSCAPE: New figures of the French formal garden

A unique installation at the heart of the National Archives’ garden. Around ten white stoneware planter-sculptures are positioned along the courtyard’s axes, interacting with the columns, the conical box trees and the site’s classical architecture. Inspired by the conventions of the French formal garden (geometry, symmetry, the staging of plants), the project offers a contemporary interpretation that is more radical and at times unconventional. Straddling the line between homage and reinterpretation, the works introduce a new formal vocabulary in which the landscape becomes a playground.

This is a new exploration of forms that foster a close dialogue between architecture and landscape. With Sculpture/Paysage, Johanna de Clisson has conceived a series of sculptural planters inspired as much by the modernist creations of Rita Lawrence and Willy Guhl as by the world of the classical garden. Whether form, vessel, sculpture or human silhouette, each piece defies a single definition. The volumes, deliberately simple and architecturally structured, evoke fragments of landscape, totems or reimagined ornaments. Straddling geometric rigour and organic presence, they accommodate plants with Mediterranean hues. Through this collection, the French formal garden becomes less a historical reference and more a vocabulary to be reinterpreted. The conventions of ornamentation, symmetry and the staging of living elements are shifted, simplified or amplified to bring forth new forms that are both familiar and unexpected. PARIS DESIGN WEEK FROM 9 TO 19 SEPTEMBER AT THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES IN PARIS