Jade Tailhandier

Jade Tailhandier is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is a shifting and dissident ecosystem. She uses installation, writing, video, painting, drawing, photography, ceramics and sculpture to create artifacts that tell stories. A jack-of-all-trades and an expert in nothing at all, she identifies with the figure of the tinkerer[1]. As much as possible and in a resilient approach, she creates from the means at her disposal and adapts according to the materials and tools that she gleans[2], recovers, peddles or collects in her environment.
She designs installations as patchworks of imagination and materials, which tend towards the transformation of our gestures and our ways of living for the healing and respect of the creatures of our planet. In an animist and syncretic approach, she is interested in the stories carried by objects: their territorial anchoring, their historical memory, their symbolic potential.
These artifacts, often made from recycled materials, hybridize popular makeshift aesthetics with the use of more noble materials such as porcelain[3].
Jade is interested in experimental spaces to welcome other forms of life, by summoning folklore, dreams, botanical knowledge and reinvented or forgotten rituals. She is crossed by hopepunk[4], ecofeminist, queer, pirate[5] and decolonial thoughts, all stories which seek to bring out alternatives.
Inspired by the figure of the chameleon, she wanders from community to community, carrying like a magpie, seeds, cuttings, gestures and ideas, in radical utopias[6], places of community life, of struggle, which are so many experimental laboratories of resistance[7] to the conformist machine in which we live.

[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, wild thought, Agora collection, Paris, 1962.
[2] Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986.
[3] Myriam Bahaffou, Glitter on the compost, The Stowaway, October 2022.
[4] The term hopepunk, which literally means "hope punk", is a subgenre of fantasy literature, belonging to science fiction and fantasy.
[5] Fatima Ouassak, For a Pirate Ecology – And We Will Be Free, The Discovery, February 2023.
[6] Alice Carabedian, Radical Utopia – Beyond the Imaginary of Shacks and Ruins, Threshold, March 2022.
[7] Jade Lindberg, In Praise of Weeds – What We Owe to the ZAD, The Links that Liberate, June 2018.