Researcher-artist based between Paris and Brussels, Laure Winants explores the interplay of ecosystems through the dialogue between matter and light. Her works, sensitive to their surroundings, respond to light, time, temperature, and humidity.
The collections of the Musée de Minéralogie each bear witness, in their own way, to a relationship with time: fossils, for instance, evoke the remnants of a past era that endures, while quartz, used in watchmaking, allows us to measure time as it passes.
Drawing on the museum's richly varied holdings, the artist sets three temporal scales in tension: the geological time of minerals and crystallization, the biological time of marine organisms, and the contemporary time of ongoing transformation.
It is by highlighting the interdependence of these three temporalities that Laure Winants builds her reflection, organized around a thread that runs through all of her work: time makes light.
Developing experimental sculptural forms made from calcareous materials and biological fragments, Winants brings the collection's marine fossils (limestone, shells, petrified organisms) into resonance with her own contemporary fossils. Her pieces, at times speculative, offer a vision of fossilization not as a closed phenomenon, but as a process that remains definitively active.
Musée de Minéralogie
Founded in 1794, the Musée de Minéralogie is part of the venerable École des Mines de Paris (Mines Paris - PSL), which trains outstanding engineers equipped to meet the challenges of tomorrow. The museum holds a mineral collection of major, world-renowned importance, along with gemstones, meteorites, and ornamental stones. It presents 5,000 objects to the public across 12 rooms, set within a preserved nineteenth-century interior. Since scientific rigor often pairs remarkably well with artistic creativity, the Musée de Minéralogie has for several years now been inviting contemporary artists to take creative license with its collections, bringing them to life in fresh and unexpected ways.