“Thirteen large digital prints on Rhodoïd, made from sea photographs, embrace each of the chapel’s stained glass windows. These images like windows have the function of letting pass. It is not what they represent, but what they reveal. They act as places of passage. Ephemeral these digital works relaunch the status of the stained glass window, state its poetic side by abandoning the narrative.  

When entering the chapel, the stained-glass windows at the top of the north façade show the reflective surface of the sea, those below evoke the fleshly appearance of the red sea. The west facade, that of the rose window displays a calm, almost oily sea. The south facade shows the impetuosity of the waves. Changing works, varying according to the light and the emotions; the images dialogue, questioning each other, the sun illuminating one and attenuating the other.

Michelle Héon is not at her first installation in a church. With this room, she says, "I seek to transform this place while keeping its sacred character. The church is a place where you can stop, settle down, have a space of your own. I try to keep this aspect of things and invite people to deepen this behavior.' The church is bathed by the silent presence of red water light. The wandering space, the nave like an inverted ship’s hull, is returned inside the matrix waters, the primordial red waters.

The installation is reminiscent of the passage of the Red Sea through the waters, the sea opened in two by Moses. Just like you feel like you’re in the belly of Jonah’s whale. The red of the sea can be compared to the blood especially on the stained glass windows of the north facade, those of the bottom, comparable to the entrails of the whale. We’re in the water. All this takes on a mythical dimension as if the great mother goddess was behind all this: the belly, the sea, the blood, the birth, the feminine force of nature.

Michelle Héon does not work with light, she reveals the opacity, the layers, the sublayers of the collective unconscious, its archetypes. Who hasn’t dreamt of breaking waters taking everything in their path? The sea is a symbol of the unconscious, of immemorial fears. The sea and the unconscious are powers, forces rising from the depths by surprise to the surface as certain feelings come to erase the resolutions that were believed to be immutable. Nothing is immutable, everything is moving. Colors carry the idea of hot and cold currents. The photographic image is confused with light. The depth is hidden on the surface of the water. Everything becomes reflections, layers of water, gilded mirrors. The artist bathes the church, bathes a space as someone who punctuates a speech under the influence of the unconscious by articulating with the rhythm and the slowness of the whites between the words.

The more invisible the work, the more present it becomes. Between water and fire, image and light, presence and absence, the installation of Michelle Héon structures this 17th century chapel in a place of reflection of the gaze.” 

© Françoise Rod 2006, Cuges-les-Pins, France. Translated from French text: Rouge est la mer.