“The seventh child in a family of farmers from the Drôme region, Françoise Vergier studied art in Marseille and Aix-en-Provence, later living in Le Havre and Paris before settling near Grignan, where she built a house and studio facing the picturesque Provençal countryside. Her country roots and deep attachment to the land, the garden and the spectacle of nature has left a lasting mark on her work. F. Vergier is a singular artist who stands, in her own words, “midway between painting and sculpture, masculine and feminine, body and landscape, death and life”. From her early painted lime wood sculptures in the 1990s to her latest installations consisting in hybrid combinations of wooden constructions, ceramic objects and fetishist trinkets (Conversations avec une âme défunte, 2008), F. Vergier’s entire body of work revolves around the notions of femininity, eroticism, birth, and death, in that she believes in the therapeutic properties of artistic creation and in the magical power of art to soothe, combat destructive forces, and help us reconcile with the world. Though often of autobiographical origins (allusions to motherhood, to the death of parents, to lovesickness), her sculpture-objects draw on universal archaic sources and refer to ancient myths like that of the mother-goddess.” […]

Excerpt from a text by Marie Laure Bernadac, 2013
Translated by Lucy Pons, 2019