Between Matter and Object
Ferréol Babin’s objects often begin with a tension between what is made and what is found. Stone, glass, light and industrial materials are brought together without fully resolving their differences, allowing the object to remain somewhere between artifact and designed form. His work is drawn to the moment when material begins to assert its own character.
In Falaise, a bright pocket of mouth-blown glass appears to spill across a jagged mineral landscape. The contrast is physical as much as visual: transparency against opacity, softness against fracture, the fluid appearance of glass against the fixed weight of the rock-like base. Rather than disguising the meeting of these materials, Babin makes their collision the subject of the vase.
The Fusion series takes this encounter further. Stone gradually gives way to mirror, lamp or container, producing objects that seem to belong to no single category or period. The industrial element appears almost to have emerged from the mineral surface, while the irregularity of the stone interrupts the precision normally associated with manufactured objects. Babin describes his practice as a balance between rationality and emotion, allowing the technical to recede so that an object can become quiet, strange and contemplative.
