Ambre Cardinal: Choreographic objects to live in the moment
Interview by Ayae Takise
Through film, photography, and jewelry creation, or “body sculptures” in her vocabulary—French artist-designer Ambre Cardinal portrays her poetic universe. Pursuing the concept of Harmony between shape and body is what she pursues, dance is often utilized as a motif featured in her works.
Ambre travelled from Paris to Japan often, as frequently as once per half a year. Although her exhibition Beyond Senses at Ultrasupernew Gallery in Tokyo was planned for this April as a conclusion of her creative residence, it was postponed due to COVID-19. Regarding the human body as a “sensorial temple”, Ambre's artworks are intended to be a means for emancipating the body. Furthermore, they suggest the holistic relationship connecting body and spirit – which may be the ultimate topic for us in the post-COVID world. Through engaging us in this conversation, we are prompted to reevaluate the body through the dancing of her works.
A universe shared to understand the body’s fertility
A lively Parisienne who would start dancing anywhere when she feels like it, at times pausing the conversation with a charming “chotto mattene (‘wait a second’ in Japanese)” and speaks while carefully choosing her words. This is how I would describe Ambre, who shared so much with me in spite of becoming my friend only less than a year ago. Every time we met, our conversations revolved around our shared love of dance (she once performed Bejart’s Bolero at a bar, telling how her father loved the piece).
So I found it surprising when, on the occasion of me interviewing her through video call after she returned to France, she kept repeating that she was a “very sensitive person”. I found it more appropriate to understand her as a highly perceptive person who resolves what she senses with incredible depth.
While working freelance for established clients—whether it be to design displays for reputed fashion brands or as part of a film production—under the title of an artist designer, Ambre continues to develop her artistic practices with vigor. Natural creativity and pure intuitiveness for creating with her own hands led her to what she has become nowadays.
“After studying jewelry making in France, I went to the Royal College of Art in London to develop my staging skills through film and photography, in order to communicate my universe.
Why I became an artist-designer – I didn't really decide to, it just happened that way. I was uninterested in designing for function, what is expected from me for the product design industry.
From the beginning, my goal was to design objects that draw out emotions and make you question your own body. Through developing my installations and visual expression, I want to invite people to be more immersed in the present moment and feel with their body.”
The head piece becomes a necklace or vice versa, and the pieces adorning her hands change form freely with movement.
“When I make jewelry, I usually hammer the metal directly on my own body. Observing how they could resonate together as a sculpture, there is a moment when the material starts to express itself and gain life. I keep seeing how metal reacts to the body’s elegant movement, thinking ‘If I move this way, the metal will shape that way’.
I receive lots of positive comments from people who tell me that they feel beautiful wearing them. I want them to have self-empowerment, feeling more connected to their bodies and understanding the fertility of it.”
Capturing energy from movement: dance and kinetic art
Her dynamic process of creation - as though both body and material are worn by one another - is certainly unique. In her 2017 short film Mobil, which features the homonymous jewelry series, her philosophy of harmonizing material and body is made obvious.
“To me dance is the most efficient – or rather the purest – body language to make us stop thinking and simply connect our body and spirit together. It triggers people’s emotion in a very natural way, so it relates to my theory. I am really sensitive, which is why I am captivated by dance. For me, I see dance and jewelry as forms that come from the same energy, so they really complement each other.”
Kinetic art is also one notable source of her inspiration. Like Alexander Calder, who she “loves how he worked with lines all his life and pushed it into balancing, levitating sculptures, evoking the connection between earth and sky”, Ambre lets the viewers unite to the beauty of the installation.
“My passion is to bring sculpturing to a spiritual level. I want the viewers to immerse into the installation space through their senses, feel as if they are part of the artistic experiment, and be at the heart of it. When they take part in my universe, I want them to become more aware and start to comprehend their body in a new way.”
Resonance of body, sculpture, and space, evolving with time
The postponed exhibition Beyond Senses should have been an ideal opportunity to experience her installations. To better understand the intentions that went behind this endeavor, here is an excerpt of her exhibition statement:
This exhibition, portrayed as a Sensorial Temple, presents refined natural materials such as metal, wood, and flowers that are suspended in the space between the ceiling and the floor. A connection between Earth and sky questions the pull of gravity on our body and the epicenter of our spirit. Timeless and poetic, this sensorial experience invites us to live in the moment.
Each person is invited to adorn and interact with these levitating body sculptures. Inspired by kinetic art, Ambre’s pieces give meaning to the body’s movement to generate structure, volume and elegance. Each piece claims its relevance in the installation as a pillar of support, thereafter claiming an individual place. It is in the beauty of the invisible that inner freedom is born.
Through the six days exhibition period, performances and workshop events designed to critically engage the five senses were scheduled to be held for the visitors. Especially the dance performance, in collaboration with dancer Sakurako Horikoshi, was intended to be work that is site-specific to the exhibition space with Ambre’s works hanging from the gallery ceiling.
“My idea was to make the dance evolve through images of natural elements: water, fire, earth and air. In the beginning of creation, I handed Sakurako a playlist of music inspired by those elements to inspire her movements and feelings. With Sakurako’s movements resonating with my hanging works, I wanted to create a dance that sculpts the space throughout the performance. Seeing her choreography, I thought that dancing relates to breathing, adding this kind of glow and pulse to the music to let us feel time.”
Combining the senses and emotion into a visual language
Some works comprising Beyond Senses also appear in the 2019 short film Senses, which was well-received in numerous independent film competitions. While individual scenes serve to represent each of the five senses, the extraordinarily refined approach to stimulating the viewer's sensuality becomes clear when the work is taken as a whole.
“Film is one of my favorite media to fully express my universe and give form to the jewelries at a different dimension. Like the Braille Belts. It embodies the sensuality of having a personal message through your belt, which is an item that envelops your body.”
The Braille Bracelet, part of the same series as the Braille Belt which appeared in the film
“Senses is playful and deep at the same time, a sensorial and selective game. I wanted to play with two people’s intimacy so they could go through their inner journey through personal senses and achieve their emotions. Each scene conceals a part of the human essentials—relationship intimacy, sensitivity, kindness, the ability of judgement, acceptance. The sense of hearing is important for me above all, because everything works through the harmony of vibration and echoes. That is why I concluded the film with a scene of the sense of hearing. Combining music with the image gives texture, and that’s what I really love about this film.”
Like the creative process for Beyond Senses, Ambre determined the keywords capturing the particular sense and related emotion for each scene, allowing the choreography to be developed by the dancers. Despite ample preparation, as production circumstances allowed only one day of filming, Ambre's vision of creating a piece that "expresses the five senses'' would not have been realised without the willingness to take on all challenges.
“The project was pretty ambitious. It was very difficult to be consistent with the concepts when working towards their final realization. The hardest part was bringing the objects to reality. I frequently questioned myself in the midst of creation, ‘why did I put so many rules on myself?’. Setting limitations gives you a specific space to evolve and create in, it helps you go beyond your existing creative language. Eventually I was surprised with myself at how I became able to do new things, so I was happy.”
Beauty at once personal and universal, found in complexity
The film features Turkish dancer Utku Bal and Dalila Cortes, whose roots were in Columbia. They were an ideal cast for Ambre, who was interested in foreign cultural practices and perspectives.
“I aim to represent a universal beauty of humans from a mixture of cultures. This is why I collaborated with dancers who come from diverse backgrounds and cultures.”
Mainly residing in Paris, Ambre often travels to other countries both to travel and to pursue her creative practices. Of her favorite destinations, she notes that the cultures of Japan and India are especially different from her own. The way Japanese and Indian people conduct their daily lives and utilize their bodies serve as an important source of inspiration.
“I love to travel and immerse myself in different cultures. Japan is notably different from France as people are more suggestive about their bodies, showing their charm through exposing. Japanese people delicately suggest sensuality with their bodies in a subtle, atmospheric way. I feel this is special.
Why Japan? You know how there are some things you cannot completely explain…When I first came to Japan, I just fell in love with the spirituality and little-ness of this country. Maybe because I also have the spirituality within myself.”
At India
“In India, women expose their belly and ankle. Ankles are thought to be among the most sensual body parts where femininity is revealed. It is also taken as the beginning of the body. You could hear anklet bells ringing under women’s long skirts when they walk. The bell anklet is very common from newborn babies to elders, and this is where I got inspired for my work Ring Shoes which also appears in Senses.
Human complexity is worth digging into. There are so many ways to express our emotion while we aim for the same thing, personally and universally at the same time. This is the biggest discovery I made through my journeys. Something personal and universal – human body lines, the material and themes of my works, and of course dance. I want to underline the in-between state between human, movement, and surrounding vibration to convey this.”
An essence that is universal before oriental
While listening to her, the Japanese word "awai" or "ma（間）" suddenly came to mind. Ambre, who is drawn to Asian cultures, certainly grasps the same plane of thought embodied by it. It may be translated to mean space, gap, break, span, relationship... anything that indicates an in-between state. At the same time, its kanji character comprises phrases denoting essential concepts such as human, time, space and moment. Her works provide the means for visualizing and interacting with energies that are at once intangible and undeniable, such that we are able to reassess our all too materialistic lifestyles.
Ambre stayed in Japan up until the State-of-Emergency Declaration, after which she returned to her apartment in France. During her interview, the resolve she had to maintain tranquility and peace of mind was clear even through the screen of our video call.
“It is merely a day since I came back to France. The government, the media and people communicate in a direct and honest manner. It makes me act in reality and feel safer than in Japan. Earlier, among my Japanese friends I felt resilience and shouganai kind of feeling from them without any fears or hysteria. I feel this is a very strong word to express the state of mind to accept what happens but keep going. But from some point I felt people were hiding their real feelings, government not making decisions but just telling you to stay home. It was scary. We were conscious enough to know but felt like they were deceiving us.
I prefer to know the truth, be aware of things. I want to learn from accepting rather than creating a new reality. For me it is to clear the fog for better vision of the world. This is what I offer through my works, and we really need that now. We have pushed our society too far, as far as we could. Amid or after this crisis, we should reprioritize our values and learn to refocus on true importance in life, get grounded to our body and senses.”
The ideas that came to Ambre and the words she uses to describe them may seem similar to those of the recently popular mindfulness movement. However, in Ambre's case, they are nothing more than a result of applying our innate intuition, not a boom dependent upon the complexities of capitalism.
Taking the body as just another part of nature, the process of molding metals melds with the surrounding space and the flow of time. Rather than as a performance art, dance is an activity rooted in our natural beings that resonates with the energies lying within. By lending an ear to the sensorial temple that is our bodies, we are able to listen to the voices of our inner minds; this is how we can build a closer connection with the world.
Her recent work "“Copper Seed” is more than a beautiful piece to be displayed. As a product that can be drank with any drink, it reminds you that copper is an irreplaceable part of a healthy body’s diet.
Nurturing body intelligence to connect with the present moment
In between interview sessions, the topic somehow changed to “trance.” We talked about the Oise Odori, a traditional dance ritual in Uwajima, Japan, the Sufi dance (which Ambre knew during the rehearsal for Senses), the Moroccan ancient trance music band The Master Musicians of Joujouka, which has inspired hippie culture, and Legon, a Balinese dance which remarkably reveals how the natives take their body as a compilation of spirits in each parts. At the end, Ambre said the following as though she stumbled on something new.
“Like I said before, dance is pure communication, that’s why I want to combine it to my work because I want the body to express first. Without overthinking, it is a sensorial act. I find it really interesting to explore trance dance, where the body overcomes the mind and connect to the spirit at its most. We learn to be logical enough to solve problems with our mind, but what about gaining body intelligence? This is what dance teaches us. At least – when you have movements – whether you are the dancer or the audience, and music surrounds you, we could live in the moment sensually.”
Through thousands of years, humans have become increasingly rational. However, in exchange for our brain’s increased capacity for logic and modern science, our body’s holistic intelligence has only weakened with time. Our ability to think is not limited only to a single organ; by possessing sharp senses and understanding when to rely on intuition, many factors connect with our thought processes. Ambre’s works precisely identifies that which we have abandoned for so long, posing its absence to us in the wake of her unwavering convictions.
Ambre Cardinal / artist-designer
A graduate of the Royal College of Art London, Ambre is an artist-designer who works across a wide range of disciplines, with a specific focus on art and fashion. She works for established clients such as Hermes, Estee Lauder, Krug, and Lancome.
She develops her own poetic universe, expressing herself through various artistic media like film and body sculptures, aiming to share self-empowerment in an elegant and subtle way. Her work is a constant research of harmony between shapes and bodies. Today, she exhibits her sensual artworks in Paris, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hong Kong.
Website: https://ambrecardinal.com/
Instagram: @ambre.cardinal
Vimeo: Ambre.cardinal