Thought i saw something
Éléonore Coyola
Thought i saw something
Like a gardener attentive to the changing seasons and landscapes, Éléonore Coyola observes spaces shaped by human hands – vast, planted forests where trees stand in regular, evenly spaced rows. She finds it strange, this way of imposing order on what seems to resist. And yet, at the same time, she finds it deeply beautiful. Are the trees sad to be aligned like this? It is the beauty of numbers – of numbers that can tell stories and master nature.
Project
In the same vein, there are crop circles – vast, perfect, and mysterious geometric shapes that appear in the fields. There are also the towering metal creatures that water them, moving slowly along in the summer. Gardens and waterways cut through to provide irrigation, laid out with perfect symmetry among the hedgerows. And then there are the roadsides – places where a The word garden comes from the German Garten, meaning “enclosure”. Everything takes place within a well-defined framework: the field, the sheet, the grid. Éléonore’s drawings recall the structured and pixelated backdrops of the games of our childhood: two hours spent in Minecraft building the village of her dreams. There are also all the animals in the garden, for whom these fences are not prisons, since they just need to go through them or go around them. There are balls of yarn, like seeds that refuse to grow. They also look like spider cocoons, small silk balls that protect the eggs until they hatch.
Excerpt from Good News from the Trap, Tina Bonny, 2026, for the exhibition catalogue, I Will Let All Kinds of Birds Fly in My Home
Caption: Sculpture and drawing.
