MARION MADRANGE

My name is Marion Madrange and I am 20-years-old. I have a general Baccalaureate S, an art prep in Paris, and now I’m in my third year of DNA product design at ESAD in Reims.

When I came out of confinement, I realized one thing: we no longer live with nature! We no longer weave a link with it. From my point of view, this period allowed me to feel that something was missing. I then asked myself how I could create a link with nature: a bridge between it and our habitat, as artificial as it is.

Color is everywhere. Everything that surrounds us naturally is colored. It is obvious that it is not for nothing that we are endowed with a view that allows us to see countless shades and colors. And all of them have an influence on our state of mind. A bright orange will not provoke the same emotion as a pastel green.
In every place where we live, there is a different vegetal and mineral environment. From this principle, I deduced that all colors from nature are good colors!
The idea is therefore to use the colored source of the plants that surround us to reinsert them in our habitat, in our living environment, in our sheets, our clothes, our tablecloths, our curtains …

I arrived in Boisbuchet having no idea where I was going, but knowing full well that I was there for one good reason: to discover the natural colors of Boisbuchet!
The place is incredible, with its architecture, each building crazier than the other, the mythical furniture, a gigantic library, fully-equipped workshops and vegetation as far as the eye can see. It took me a whole day to discover the site, to draw the place, the nature, to grasp its very atmosphere and to absorb it. I found it important to know exactly where I was. The next day I started to collect the plants and began my color experiments. In total, I collected about a hundred different natural colors: shades ranging from brown to yellow, pink to gray. This is the portrait of Boisbuchet at a moment: I have captured the essence of this place.

The main idea of this project being only an opening to the vegetable dye, I used it to make an herbarium – a collection of all the plants and colors that I found on the site. It will be offered to the Boisbuchet domain free of access. In the end, you will find pages just waiting to be filled in by those who want to continue this quest for colors.

My stay in Boisbuchet was extremely enriching. It was my first residency, and where for the first time I was completely autonomous for the realization of a project. I was able to experiment without slacking off and produce work that lived up to my expectations. And it was a success for me, because this project opened the doors to the world of colors, natural or not, and this is only the beginning of my research!