FICTIONAL SOUVENIRS, FAULTY PORTALS: IN CONVERSATION WITH LÉA PORRÉ

Let's get into it!

I was born in Paris and moved to London at 15, so there has been a lot of back and forth over the years, but I'm now strictly based in London. The UK is and will be my home by choice.

I am actually from Brittany, a region located in the northwest of France, one of the six Celtic nations, and the only one south of the English Channel. It's quite similar culturally and topographically: stones, natural and standing, moss, an odd palm tree, an ominous sense of the persistence of folklore, and the long-lost idea of Finis Terrae, of being at the end of the Earth, are common traits. It's undoubtedly at the heart of my cultural heritage.

I studied at Central Saint Martins and then the Royal College of Art, where I graduated in 2021. Over the years, I've been refining the aims and peculiarities of my practice, but my primary fields of research have remained the same: history, memory, and myth.

Over the recent years, it took me a while to figure out the right balance of digital and physical tools and techniques to produce sculptures. As I've been collecting ancient craft skills along the way, especially in 2025 when I devoted a large part of my time to that objective, I've experimented with different materials and settled on wood, both walnut and oak in different ways, and forged metal for 'Trophaeum' and 'Armour Bright'.

The imagery on the MDF is digitally constructed through worldbuilding. That process involves creating 3D worlds in a video game engine, from which I shoot a series of images, then featured on what I call the "frames."

If these frames operate as portals to that alternate constructed world, all of the materials used perform as remains. Detached from their original context, they confront each other, bringing their own sets of meanings and references. The focal point is finding a balance in that juxtaposition.

Practically, this involves a lot of mockups, digital and in real life: adding, removing, duplicating, switching up elements until the work reaches a relative point of completion. I'm still allowing myself to alter the assemblage and try to propose different "iterations" of works for different shows. I'm currently working on new 'Armour Bright' sculptures, so the series itself is still evolving.

In a similar fashion to my "frames," the image was shot within a 3D world. Building that environment takes place first, and the shooting later. It functions not too dissimilarly to a photo or film set. If at first the project began as a video piece in 2023, it only made it to the physical plane through wood and textile.

I have been working with tapestries since 2019, only finding their appropriate place in 2024 when I paired them with forged metal as a hanging device. Jacquard is the ancestor of computing, programmable weaving as 0s and 1s; it is fundamentally the original binary system.

Historically, tapestries have been used as authoritarian devices, symbols of power that framed events: warfare losses woven into victories, tales laced as events, myths intertwined as memories. Constructing a virtual world, weaving a fictional narrative on a grand scale, it was perfectly clear.

It's a very interesting wording: real myth, invented heraldry, versus what we traditionally think is invented myth, real heraldry.

In regard to our past, I don't think I clearly draw a line between what's deemed part of official history and what's shared folklore, between a dream that keeps recurring and a memory that's been passed through generations. It's all a blurred construction, a subjective vision that evolves across time and place.

In 2020 and 2021, we could say that I was already drawn to creating environments. If they first unfolded digitally, using video game engines and video, it made a lot of sense to embrace online exhibitions as a medium, especially during those Covid days. Yet I never allowed anyone to walk through the digital worlds using tools such as AR or VR. I only offered snapshots, constructed snippets of the worlds.

Maybe it goes back to how I view our past. Flashes, visions, partial recollections, missing manuscripts, eroded inscriptions, dismembered sculptures, scripts copied and copied again. Our understanding of our past is based on a series of limited perspectives, of bizarre re-enactments, and yet utterly influenced by our own background.

At the same time, it had always been my intention to bring the work into physical space. It was just a matter of time.

In the end, my physical exhibitions are not so differently constructed from how the online exhibitions were. The wallpapers, the frames, the sculptures: they only give clues and partial access, like a faulty portal. Keeping with the logic of the video game, or the estranged idea of a quest, I'm giving the viewer an occasion to collect fragments and build their own vault of remains along the way.

My work is very much rooted in this sense of liminality; thresholds, portals, they are lexicons and motifs that return cyclically in my works, but the notion of "liminal" is also at the core of how the works behave.

For the PATARA Gallery installation, I have used wallpapers in that way, as fragmented portals to the fabricated digital world, and the wood sculptures purposefully didn't quite function as locks and keys.

For the Ujazdowski Centre of Contemporary Art installation, I specifically hinted at the "hellmouth" motif. Portraying a giant monster's mouth as a gate to hell, it appears in Medieval scenes and depictions in both 2D and 3D, from painting and illumination to stained glass and bas-reliefs. In a sense, it is a fictional portal used as a fear device, an interesting counterpoint to churches' portals representing Gates of Heaven (Porta Coeli), or pearly gates.

In my version, the ornate shape of the wallpaper's cutout frames the doorway, underlining the symbolic history of sites of passage, as well as the power of frame and ornament in the construction of meaning.

My work directly speaks to how collective memory gets built. Accumulation, trace, remain, relic, a faint memory, an idea: the works are composed of accumulated layers of how the past is remembered.

I'm tracing this practice to the idea of mnemo-history developed by Jan Assmann, which looks at the afterlife of events rather than events themselves, how figures and events of our past are remembered, reimagined, and twisted.

Our collective memory is built on that, built on traces rather than on the exactitude of our past, and that's how I build all aspects of my practice.

'Pending Response' will open this August at Somers Gallery with INKU. The team got in touch and expressed interest in the 'Armour Bright' series being featured, and I was intrigued by the show's focus on "intervals, returns, and suspension."

For 'Armour Bright' specifically, I have been examining fragmented gates and finials. Traditionally positioned atop sacred structures to signify protection, ascension, or authority, the finial is here fractured, multiplied, and reoriented, no longer directed upward but toward all cardinal directions. I thought it was particularly fitting in the context of this show: out of its original usage, adrift, floating, hovering.

I think you've exactly pinpointed the incentive behind the works. It's exactly that moment of rupture I'm interested in, the uneasiness created by the constellation of symbols that feels familiar yet eerie at the same time. Drawing the viewer in closer through a recognisable shape or object, yet something feels amiss: it is present, yet not fully here. An uncanny sentiment of being out of time, out of space, out of use.

Thank you for underlining that. Indeed, the underlying question, as you phrased it, and the research, is always ingrained in each work: they are moving parts of a connected inquiry.

The main aim behind each work is to produce a fictional souvenir, a trace of a dream that you couldn't remember. Something I speak a lot about is the idea of creating an "impossible encounter."

To go back to your first question, I do position myself as a dream archaeologist and an unreliable narrator. Now, if these terms seem complex, they are simply here to point to the enchanting, labyrinthine path within these larger and abstract notions of real and virtual, of truthful and fake, of digital and physical, of set and site.

Materially, I've been experimenting with glass, stained glass, through both foiling and leading. But the beauty and pain of attempting to tame so many different crafts is that inevitably some will not always work out or find their way. Let's see. This year, I've been working on a firescreen that involves glass, and I would like to attempt to complete it towards the end of the year, after more pressing deadlines.

Medieval illumination and gilding, besides a small feature in 'Topia' hasn't found a central place in any of the works as well.

I'm also learning more about Gothic tracery, from where fragmented shapes have already found their place in works I'm currently producing.

I'm taking the time to learn, to unlearn, and make each craft, but also each specific research interest, my own. They might find a natural place in upcoming works, or not, and if so, that's okay as well.