Le vivant comme matière [Living Matter]

For one week, the artist Silvana Mc Nulty accompanied the students from the Visual Arts program at the Belfort School of Art for a workshop on the theme of organic materials and their assembly.

Each participant approached the theme in their own way, exploring one or several artistic techniques. The works produced—rich and varied—were presented on Thursday, February 12, 2026, during a public presentation held at the School of Art.

“I felt a genuine commitment on their part: working directly with the materials they had brought—organic, fragile, sometimes unsettling—immediately generated a kind of creative and productive tension. Very quickly, an energy emerged, along with a real appropriation of the material.

The large individual notebook I had made for each of them played an essential role. It became a parallel space: a space for experimentation, notes, drawing, and traces. Some students recorded very precise observations about the transformation of materials; others developed preparatory sketches or more intuitive gestures. The notebook helped anchor the work in a slower, almost reflective temporality, in constant dialogue with the three-dimensional development of their project.”

During this intensive workshop, the students explored different ways of engaging with living matter: peeling, weaving, assembling, juxtaposing with industrial materials. In doing so, they were able to test their ability to accept the instability of the material—discoloration, fragility, alteration, decay—as an integral part of the process.

Silvana Mc Nulty (born in 1995) lives and works in Paris. She first earned an AFEDAP diploma in jewelry-making in Paris before continuing her studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam) and at HEAR (Strasbourg).
She has exhibited, among other venues, at In Extenso (Clermont-Ferrand), La Manufacture (Roubaix), Le Creux de l’Enfer (Thiers), Treize (Paris), the Salon de Montrouge, Crédac (Ivry-sur-Seine), and in Brey-et-Maison-du-Bois for the Biennale Art en Chapelles (Jura). She is represented by the Florence Loewy gallery in Paris.