In Ninon Hivert’s multimedia work, an object’s afterlife is an unfolding story—discarded items retaining the memory of a body, its gestures, and its relationship to its environment. She works like an archaeologist, observing with patient attention before translating a found object anew, capturing the textures of contemporary urban life in the process.
Hivert’s study of the forgotten object began by documenting in photographs, then later in clay sculpture, the uncertain gestures of cast-off clothing. In recent work, she has expanded focus to a more general cast of quotidian items. Isolating artifacts at moments of abandon, she clarifies the contour of a presence left behind.
If the present is built on a ceaseless changing from future into past, Hivert’s work captures the strength of this elusive state. Like grain into spirit, her work is a process of distillation. The qualities of an object change slightly each time they are recaptured in a new medium, ultimately extracting something eternal from an unsuspecting in-between moment.
Hivert’s latest exhibition, Ce Qui Est, Ce Qui Sera, Ce Qui Fut. (“That Which Is, That Which Will Be, That Which Has Been.”) at Chapelle XIV in Paris, brings the ongoing themes of her oeuvre to new materials and motifs.
Stacks of flattened cardboard and bags of clothing are compressed into ceramic cubes, their bulging surfaces recording the tension of containment. Glass bubble-wrap sculptures from Hivert’s Demi-Jour series line shelves—fragile objects posing as protective shells for absent contents. A bronze cast of work gloves rests nearby, monumentalizing gestures of past labor. In the background, torn collages evoke the weathered palimpsests of wheatpaste advertisements caught between removal and renewal.
Working in bronze and pâte de verre—a glass molding technique made from fused glass powder—alongside clay, photography, and collage, Hivert treats the dialogue between material and environment with precision. These recent projects are as conceptually rigorous as they are visually striking. Hivert explains:
With glass, after modeling the bubble wrap in clay, a molding process was added, introducing new gestures, new steps, and successive states of matter into this translation. The final result of Demi-Jour was, for me, a kind of serendipity: I ended up with a solid but translucent sculpture, where the dark mass inside disappeared when light passed through it, as if I had captured a shadow.
Hivert’s observations evoke both tenderness and critique. While her work embraces the poetics of transition, it also implicates the viewer in cycles of consumption. What happens when an object slips from use into waste? When does a functional item cease to be visible, and what remains in that unseen interval?
Articulating this fragile “in-between,” Hivert illustrates the transitional state’s autonomy. The result is a body of work that neither mourns nor admires what has been discarded. Hivert allows materials to persist in ambiguity, occupying time differently. In their quiet stubbornness, these forms evoke both what has been and what will be: temporalities bound together by the ever-renewing gestures of the present.
Ce Qui Est, Ce Qui Sera, Ce Qui Fut. runs from October 10 to December 20 at Chapelle XIV in Paris. Find more from Hivert on her website or on Instagram.
Georgia E. Norton de Matos is a guest contributor for Colossal, reporting from Paris.
