© Dominique Lacloche

Dominique Lacloche

Dominique Lacloche was born in 1960 in Rome. She currently lives and works between Paris and London.

Lacloche’s practice consists of printing silver gelatin photographic images onto giant Gunnera Manicata leaves. The leaves of this South American plant are distinctive for their disproportionate sizes, measuring up to 2 or 3 meters across, making the plant extremely precarious to handle.

This unique plant and photographic technique converge by virtue of light – the unpredictable nature of organic and chemical “life” plays out in her work through photosynthesis and photographic revelation. The image passes through delicate, unpredictable phases and her artistic gestures yield to the force of external events that impose themselves like natural laws.

The size of the leaves accentuates the subject of the image and transports the viewer to a world where the monumental dictates its own laws. The leaves become a support for an image, part of an installation, or a pretext for other image manipulations with the negatives or through superimpositions, for example. The spatial arrangement and clarity of these giant leaves create a challenge for the artist to strike the right balance.

The images revealed on the leaves are typically landscapes reflected in water. At this scale, the landscapes are all-encompassing and poetic; they absorb the viewer in their reflections. The images become fleeting landscapes of emotion, due to the salience of the work’s spatial disposition and the material on which the images are printed. However, like apparitions hovering between the infinitely elusive and the infinitely intimate, what is communicated either faintly or clearly through the veins of the leaves is akin to visions of “another world” that could be strangely familiar to the viewer.

Lacloche’s artistic work is enhanced by her visions while painting and of architecture, two disciplines that she has studied and practiced for many years. Equally interested in evolutionary and organic temporal systems, Lacloche has additionally explored these themes through film, digital animation, sound design, and electroacoustic music composition.

Lacloche’s works are present in several private collections around the world.