Beyond Our Horizons proposes craft as a living, thinking language—one shaped by matter, time, and those who use it. Conceived through an artistic consortium between France and Japan, the exhibition invites us to step beyond the familiar, not in abandon of tradition, but through a subsuming expansion of contemporary thought.
First presented in Tokyo and later reconfigured at la Galerie du 19M, the project unfolds as an immersive environment. Inspired by the relationships between ‘nature and creation’, the exhibition moves through the principles of earth, water, fire, wind, and air—materials, energies, and conditions that shape both our individual livelihood and broader societal fabric as it influences everything from foundational infrastructures to modern understandings of time and reason.
Structured as a sequence of five chapters, the exhibition celebrates the cross-cultural exchange between French maisons d’art and Japanese craftsmanship, where inherited techniques are placed in dialogue with new interpretations, allowing tradition to appear not as something preserved, but as something continually reactivated. Materials are approached as carriers of memory and transformation, and processes reveal themselves through patience, repetition, and care.
Within this shared landscape, each artist asserts a distinct voice. Julian Farade’s work occupies a fertile threshold between abstraction and codification, where colour and form convey states of tension and instability. His paintings engage with emotional charge as a material in itself, allowing ambiguity to remain active rather than resolved. Clara Imbert approaches sculpture as a mode of inquiry, drawing from scientific structures and symbolic systems alike. Her works evoke instruments or fragments of measurement, proposing forms that oscillate between the transcendental and terrestrial. Simone Pheulpin’s practice introduces a profound sense of duration and discipline. For more than four decades, she has developed a singular sculptural language through the repetitive folding of raw cotton, producing works that evoke geological and organic formations. Her contributions anchor the exhibition in an ethics of patience, where the process of identical iterations becomes both method and meaning. While Pauline Guerrier brings an itinerant sensibility shaped by voyaging and ritual. Working between Paris and Lisbon, her practice consists of a constellation of profound messages through many mediums.
Alongside these voices, newly invited artists and designers extend the conversation, offering their own interpretations of Beyond our Horizons through sculpture, ceramics, textiles, and light. Together, these practices affirm a shared conviction: that the métiers d’art are not vestiges of the past, but vehicles towards contemporary modes of thought.
hube: Your work often plays with instability, abstraction, and the human figure. How does this tension echo your own sense of physicality, if at all?
Julian Farade: Tension resonates with me through experience, and physicality is experience on a personal level—the spatiality of emotion. The human figure is a new theme for me. I like instability because it feels more true to life, at least as I experience it. I think ideas of security are often false or disguised as control. I’m not sure about abstraction; many artists I admire use the term ‘figural’. I’m drawn to works that carry more than one meaning, which is why I tend to leave them open-ended—but it’s not literal abstraction. Maybe that’s the tension.
h: Your work often unfolds at an architectural scale. What first led you toward large- scale installation, and how did your relationship with the materials that shape your practice develop over time?
Clara Imbert: I think my attraction to large-scale installation comes from my relationship to space and to the body. Architecture seems to have the capacity to reveal what is invisible; a space becomes a place, defined and inhabited. It creates a dialogue between the body and its surroundings, guiding us through its walls and allowing escape through its openings. I don’t see my work as separate from the space it occupies. Architecture becomes a framework that activates the piece and, in return, the piece alters how the space is experienced. Working at an architectural scale allows me to engage the viewer physically, not just visually, inviting them to move, pause, feel tension, or simply observe. At the same time, I believe that smaller pieces can hold just as much power and can still be architectural. The mind has an extraordinary capacity for projection and imagination. Sometimes I create a smaller piece while thinking of it in a spatial or environmental context, imagining how it might one day expand into a larger space. Working on a more immersive scale, however, allows for a sense of envelopment and directly confronts us with our own physicality. I like to imagine the encounter with an artwork as a romantic one: first a moment of surprise, followed by a feeling of familiarity.
My relationship with materials developed in parallel. As the scale grew, so did my understanding of weight, balance, and resistance. I am interested in materials that come from the ground, that are a fragment of our own history, metal, stone, sand, glass. They relate to one another in a circular way. The materials also teach me patience and resilience; I can push them, but sometimes I have to stop and just listen. In that sense, scale is never about monumentality; it is about finding a form that resonates with our own physical presence in the world.
h: How does this exhibition differ from others you’ve participated in, and in what ways has the shared presence and energy of fellow artists influenced your experience of it?
Simone Pheulpin: This exhibition from La Galerie du 19M in Tokyo differs from others through its collaborative nature. Rather than simply lending an existing work, I was invited to create a new series of sculptures in dialogue with a new artisan and a material I had never worked with before: tin. This four-handed process, quite rare in my career, involved extensive exchanges with Nathalie Abscheidt, workshop manager and model maker from Maison Goossens, in order to understand how to translate my cotton-folding techniques into metal and how to bring these two materials together within a single work. It was a genuine challenge that pushed me beyond my comfort zone. The experience was immensely stimulating, and I feel both proud and honored to have collaborated with Maison Goossens on such a unique project.
h: Your practice moves fluidly between performance, beading, and other forms of making. Can you reflect on how you came to inhabit these different techniques— and whether one still feels like your most natural language today?
Pauline Guerrier: I have never approached these techniques as separate mediums, but rather as different states of a single language. Coming from a family where my parents and grandparents were all artists working across different mediums, I was exposed from an early age to practices such as ceramics, welding, sewing, and dance.
Today I always choose the medium that feels most appropriate to what I want to express, even if that means learning new techniques along the way. Techniques are like languages: the more we learn, the easier it becomes to communicate with artisans across the four corners of the world. Craft-based practices also allow me to meet the artisans and communities who carry these techniques. Through these exchanges, I learn not only about the technical processes themselves, but also about traditions, customs, belief systems, and the everyday lives of those who practice them. None of these techniques feels more ‘natural’ than another to me, although I do have a particular affinity with textile-based practices—whether weaving, embroidery, marouflage, or related processes.
h: When you begin something new, what is your point of entry—and has that changed since joining the Poush residency?
JF: My point of entry is often the same: it comes from the gap between desire and the impossibility of fulfilling that desire. I work with frustration—the tension that exists between envy, love, grief, anger, and rage. My point of entry has not changed since I joined Poush. Poush is a workspace where I have met many artists, which creates a sense of community, but I don’t think it has changed my perspective.
h: You’ve described a fascination with the space between the scientific and the sacred. How do these two realms converge in your work, and why does this tension feel particularly relevant today?
CI: The scientific world always fascinated me; as a child, I was drawn to the mysteries of our world and how science pushes the limits of knowledge. I like to think that the sacred, on the other hand, is the presence of meaning beyond function and represents something that we may not understand but that we feel. There are so many beautiful histories or mysteries in this world that science cannot alone explain.
In my work, these two notions coexist rather than oppose each other. Many of my forms resemble instruments, tools, or measuring devices, yet they don’t serve a clear function. At the same time, they can evoke talismans or ritual objects. I am interested in this ambiguity, when an object feels precise and almost scientific, but also charged with a quiet, symbolic existence. Today, we live in a world driven by digital, efficiency, and control, yet there is a growing need for meaning, ritual, and emotional connection. With my work, I try to inhabit that in-between space, where knowledge does not cancel mystery, and where the sacred can still exist within contemporary life.
h: Your commitment to a single medium and a restrained palette creates an intense field of focus. How does this discipline heighten your sensitivity to form, texture, and rhythm within the work?
SP: Working with a single medium forces me to continually push its limits. I am constantly searching for new folds, new techniques, and new forms. All of my works emerge from this ongoing process of experimentation.
Recently, for example, I developed a fold reminiscent of sea foam. A few years ago, I worked on the ‘moss fold’. Extremely tight and technically demanding, it was complex to create and master, yet it has now become one of the most recognizable elements of my work. I draw inspiration from the natural elements around me—cracks, moss, tree trunks, cliffs—and it is my attention to detail that allows me to constantly renew my practice, imagining new forms and combinations of folds. As for unbleached cotton, it never ceases to inspire me: both the material and its greige color are timeless.
h: Cultural exchange appears as a recurring current in your work. Do you experience it most meaningfully through collaboration and dialogue with other artists, or in the moment your work meets its audience?
PG: Cultural exchange, for me, first takes place through shared work. Collaborations with artisans, embroiderers, or craft houses create spaces of dialogue and silence, shaped by observation, transmission, and trust. These exchanges do not rely solely on words, but on gesture, repetition, and the time spent working together.
This exchange continues once the work leaves the studio. When it encounters its audience, it opens itself to other readings, other narratives, and other forms of memory. At that point, it no longer belongs entirely to me. I see my work as a space of circulation and transmission, and at times the audience is even invited to extend the work itself within the exhibition.
h: What has felt most resonant in preparing for this exhibition, and has it prompted any reconsideration of your earlier ideas?
JF: The most resonant experience was being able to work with Lesage and to interpret two traditional Japanese techniques in my sculptural practice. Kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing the broken) and Yakisugi (a method of preserving wood) are two very inspiring approaches to the treatment of time and care. I was very happy to have a personal take on these techniques—to transfer my way of working onto textiles: to cut, shift, break, but still, hopefully, give them meaning. In fact, I had previously worked with a textile made by Chloé Robilahy, which became the embryo of the project that later came to life with le19M x Lesage. I try to work on everything at the same time—drawing, painting, sculpting—so that I don’t interrupt the creative line. Every creation is an echo, or a call for another. It’s always a work in progress.
h: Beyond our Horizons suggests both expansion and uncertainty. What does this idea mean to you on a personal level, and what kind of emotional or sensory experience did you hope your contribution would create?
CI: For me, this idea, Beyond our Horizons by La Galerie du 19M, is about stepping out of what we already know, or imagining what is out there. On a personal level, it reflects my own relationship to making: every new work is a risk, a movement past what I already know, and it can be a very vulnerable process, but also a transformative one.
For this exhibition at the Galerie du 19M, I worked in collaboration with the Japanese artisan Suzuki Morihisa; both of our visions collided, as we did not know each other or our ways of working. It was a beautiful experience; I had the chance to learn about how he preserves and carries forward his family legacy through the traditional technique of nambu casting. This exchange opened a space of mutual sharing, where I could see the act of making through his eyes, and he through mine. The pieces are the trace of that; they become silent narrators of this experience. I believe they act as totemic figures, protecting the symbols and the hidden meanings of what exists beyond our horizon.
h: Looking at this body of work, where do you find the deepest sense of fulfilment—and in what moments did it challenge you to move beyond familiar territory?
SP: My deepest sense of fulfillment comes from the constant evolution of my technique. Looking back, I can clearly see how far my work has progressed: certain folds I create today were simply beyond my reach three years ago. This continuous development, this ability to innovate and refine my sculptural language, is profoundly rewarding.
I am also continually challenged by my gallerist, Florence Guillier Bernard of Maison Parisienne gallery, who invites me to exhibit in remarkable venues and encourages me to propose ever more ambitious, innovative, and refined works. For example, for the exhibition 15 Years, 15 Artists, 15 Artworks, held in the Hall des Maréchaux at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, I created the largest sculpture of my Croissance series to date: a piece over 1.30 meters in diameter, almost my own height! Projects like this naturally push me beyond my comfort zone.
h: During your time with 19M, was there a particular encounter, realization, or shift in perspective that fundamentally altered how you understand your practice today?
PG: The time I spent at 19M reinforced a conviction that was already present in my work: the belief that the métiers d’art are not relics of the past, but deeply contemporary languages. Being immersed in this ecosystem, in close contact with houses where rigor, precision, and transmission are central, allowed me to fully embrace my desire to continue collaborating regularly with artisans whose craftsmanship is exceptional.
I also became more aware of the collective dimension inherent in any artwork. Even when a gesture appears solitary, it is always carried by an invisible chain of knowledge, histories, and hands. This experience strengthened my desire to create works that carry this memory within them.
Photography by SOPHIE SCHIANO DI LOMBO, courtesy of LE 19M
Words: ISABELLA MICELI
