Until December 17th, Florence Poirier-Nkpa is presenting her work at the La Samanna Hotel Pavilion. Entitled «Retrospection», the exhibition is tracing the artist’s professional career and evolution since 2013.
Florence Poirier-Nkpa remembers very clearly her first school drawing that had impressed her entourage. “A donkey with a hat and a daisy coming out of the hat”, she says laughing. A detail that is not a detail since it showed Florence’s precocious appetite for art. “I have been an artist since I was born”, she summarizes. However, like many artists, her path to professionalization was not so linear and obvious. After studying applied and visual arts and starting a training in fashion design, Florence Poirier-Nkpa joined the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (Paris Saclay) to become an art teacher and follow the example of her parents. A way to ensure stability at the time, but which unfortunately didn’t bring personal fulfillment. “It took too much energy, it wasn’t for me”, she summarizes. Keeping up with this job while waiting to find her own path, Florence became passionate about travel and went to discover other countries: Cameroon, Guyana and, in 2006, Saint-Martin.
She then decided to put her teaching career on hold to create a jewelry company. In the following years, she held three boutiques, at Boo Boo Jam, rue Saint-James and rue du Général de Gaulle in Marigot, where she sold her creations and other designer jewelry. However, she couldn’t compete anymore with the costume jewelry shops that started being implanted on the territory. For the young woman, it was the trigger: “if you can’t make money, you might as well be an artist!” she laughs. Little by little, she developed her artistic activity, leading it quickly “in a professional and structured way”. In 2010, she created the HeadMade Factory collective to carry out artistic projects and promote contemporary creation in Saint-Martin.
AN EVOLUTION IN SEVERAL PHASES
Since 2013, Florence Poirier-Nkpa’s artistic practice has known several phases, all linked to her personal history and highlighted in the exhibition «Retrospection» presented at La Samanna until December 17th. The artist began with digital photomontage, through a series of self-portraits that allowed her to question the topics of identity and otherness.
“I have always felt like I was from here, from nowhere, from wherever,” she says. Fulfilled by her encounters around the world, Florence reflected on how “we build ourselves with the image of the other”. She then turned to collage by working on real photomontages composed of multiple layers, like facets of us that are projected on the other and vice versa. For her, “the other is the fantasized projection of a human ideal”.
In 2018, Poirier-Nkpa met Nigerian artist Ade Adesina, who became her colleague and mentor. She then chose to work with linocuts to “tell stories”. In her engraved compositions, she draws inspiration from the works of other artists that she admires and reinvents them by juggling between quotation, interpretation, allusion or commentary. Details and symbols populate her linoleum engravings which she then prints on paper. In the last few years, the artist has entered a new phase by developing installations based on her engravings. A way of “creating a link between what is seen, what is perceived and what is understood, so that the viewer feels integrated into the process of the artwork”.
PROFESSIONALIZE ARTISTS
Florence Poirier-Nkpa has been a full-time professional artist since 2015. Her rigor and determination have allowed her to be supported by French institutions and to be recognized internationally. For example, she has joined the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris for two years, she has been selected twice to participate in the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in London and this year she received the Individual grant for Visual Arts creation from the Department of Cultural Affairs of Guadeloupe. The work “À l’Aube” that she made in collaboration with Ade Adesina was also one of the 120 finalists of the 15th Arte Laguna Prize in Venice.
Through HeadMade Factory, Florence Poirier-Nkpa is pursuing her desire to foster a dynamic of professional creation. She has just opened in Concordia The Art KclOb, an exhibition and support space for professional or aspiring artists which welcomed its first artist in residence, Miguel Marajo from Martinique, last month. “The territory needs to professionalize this work field, to ensure that we are supported and respected”, she concludes.
RETROSPECTION SOLO SHOW
Nov 17th - Dec 17th
Le Pavillon, La Samanna - Terres Basses
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