VISUAL ART & MUSEUMS

Mathilde Roussel’s sculptures map the anatomy of time and space that we humans occupy with our fragile presence in the world. Recently featured in New York Times and Beaux Arts as a promising young French artist, Roussel will visit Nashville as an artist-in-residence to make her living sculptures on site.

"Keep yourself from breaking a tree's branches. Don't forget they contain divine bodies."
Ovid, The Metamorphoses

Specially created with Cheekwood’s botanical setting in mind, artist Mathilde Roussel’s Anatomia Botanica explores the impermanent nature of life: modification, evolution, and metamorphosis; birth, growth, fertility, aging and death. Drawing inspiration from scientific anatomical and botanical illustrations, Roussel creates art that questions our relationship with nature and serves as a commentary on the perpetual state of transformation in living organisms.

Roussel’s sculptures and drawings subtly weave together human, animal, plant and mineral forms represented through ceramic, glass, soil, seeds, paper, graphite, metal and fabric. In this exhibit, human forms made from planted wheat grass evolve and soon decay; Ceramic breasts sprout with greens; A constellation of graphite cut paper drawings evokes the carbon cycle operating between plants, animals, soil and humans.

We’re excited to announce that Anatomia Botanica will feature an entirely new work that is meant to be a symbol of Nashville’s living organs. For it, Roussel will weave red clothing donated by Nashville residents around a tree as a way of weaving their lives into that of the garden.