Etienne Chambaud Necknot, 2023

Etienne Chambaud's new work from his series of bronze sculptures entitled Necknot is a wall-mounted installation that consists of 11 parts. The bronze elements consist of life-size casts of the necks of birds. This work suggests that the knots continue into the wall and that their proliferation may retain an organic aspect, as if a growth was occurring in and out of the surface. The artists conceived 5 installation variations suitable for different spaces.

Beautiful and quietly poignant, some of the necks of the Necknot hold each other while others connect to the wall. Combining reproductions of necks from different species, among them ducks, geese and swans, the sculptures generally depict mathematical knots of varying complexity. Their softly shimmering shapes oscillate between abstraction and representation, their undulating lines invoking past impressions of the graceful long necks of wild fowl yet its anatomy here also registering as geometric composition.

The anatomical characteristics of the neck and its metaphorical associations hold a particular fascination for the artist. To Chambaud “the neck is the body part that allows the distinction and separation between the torso and the head. But if the neck is a separator, it is also a connector: the place through which air and food pass, where screams, voices and songs are produced, through which interiority expresses itself. This paradoxical form exists almost only because of what it both separates and connects, because of what it holds at its two extremities. By the simple fact that it can be more easily severed than other parts of the body, the neck has enabled the invention and development of dualism—the distinction between body and mind, between physical and mental states—and has thus had a lasting influence on the fate of human thought.“

The title, with its “k” doubling to spell “neck” and “knot”, encapsulates the function of the anatomical neck as connection between head and torso, at the same time, it can also be read as a negation—"not neck”—comparable to the mathematical term for the simplest knot: unknot.