“Floraison”, the exhibition Joëlle Rosalie Baya presented at the end of the year at Galerie Imaaya, marked a milestone in her aesthetic journey, and concluded the year-long sabbatical she took to conduct visual research. Her style has asserted itself and new avenues are taking shape… Dominique Bellier
Joëlle Rosalie is not only an artist, but also an Art & Design teacher at the Collège de Lorette in Quatre-Bornes, where she is returning this month for her twentieth school year. In 2025, this availability to her art enabled her to experiment with a manual engraving technique on the section of a tree trunk… The resulting creation, Born againcelebrates both the past, the years of a tree’s life through the rings that emerge, and its singularity, underlined by the sinuous shape of the trunk printed in black and white, in contrast with the life that begins again, in a colored seedling that the artist has sprouted from the wood.
This image is the result of a long process of working with the material, both literally and figuratively. In addition to drying the wood, the trunk section required hours of preparation. It had to be ground and polished to eliminate any saw marks, then burned, oiled and left to dry to allow the rings to appear, once inked and applied to paper… The result certainly invites an awareness of achievements, the vitality of nature and the interdependence between life and death, but it also illustrates the artist’s creative cycles, as she assumes the autobiographical nature of her expression, to which Blooming Mind, for example, refers more directly…
The chiseling of the die, the alchemy of superimpositions and the effect of surprise at the end of the press pushed Joëlle towards engraving during her studies. Today, she is just as keen on personalizing proofs by adding embroidery stitches and sewing lines, which give relief and unify the work. Sewing repairs and connects, perhaps even adding magic to the real, referring us, for example, to certain Andalusian traditions that inspired the novel Le cœur cousu, or, closer to home, to the little sachets of sewn fabric that contain some beneficial mantra… These works blend the techniques of etching and Textile art, which replaces the brush with fiber.
While some of the artist’s depictions of women deserve more rigorous attention, this exhibition sees the flowering of a personal visual alphabet drawn from plant archetypes and the artist’s documentary photographic work. Symbols of love and perfection, of an Edenic state to which everyone has the right to aspire, these floral motifs express joy and serenity, whether engraved in black ink or sewn with colored thread onto a character’s garment or hair, or whether they illustrate a concept or state of mind.
