006 Ecume (4)

Faustine Badrichani

Ecume (4)

ink and sea salt on two sheets of translucent paper - 11x 14 inches - 2024

Artist statement

Faustine Badrichani lives and works between Hong Kong, New York, and Europe. Born and raised in Provence, southern France, her childhood home was a veritable cabinet of curiosities, filled with fossils, cicada sloughs, and silent traces of life—artifacts of time and nature collected by her geologist parents. This early exposure to the organic transformations of the natural world profoundly shaped her artistic perspective, infusing her work with a deep connection between bodies and earth.
This connection to the rhythms of nature and time has permeated her art, where she explores the female form as both a subject and a landscape. Through her multidisciplinary practice— spanning painting, cyanotypes, sculpture, and body prints— Badrichani seeks to capture the fleeting, intimate moments of life, positioning the female body as a map of experience and emotion. Her work reflects the cyclical rhythms of existence, echoing the transformations of Mother Earth, where the body becomes a canvas for time’s passage and life’s unspoken narratives, and offering a raw yet poetic expression of the complex emotions tied to self-perception and identity.

Faustine Badrichani’s exploration of the female form extends beyond her body prints into her sea foam series, where the boundary between body and nature blurs in a profound and poetic way.
Drawing inspiration from the fact that the human body is composed primarily of water, Badrichani uses this series as a meditation on the body’s fluidity and the transformative nature of water. The Mediterranean Sea, a deeply personal and geographic touchstone from her youth, becomes the backdrop for her exploration. Through the process of photographing the foam patterns along its shores, she captures moments of impermanence and transformation, linking the sea’s constant movement to the ephemeral experiences of the human form.
Her process involves using sea salt water and ink to recreate these foam patterns in an organic, free-flowing style. The ink and salt water merge on the paper, creating shapes and textures that are at once spontaneous and deliberate. These visual forms evoke the cyclical process of creation and erosion, symbolizing how life experiences—from birth to aging, from joy to suffering—leave indelible marks on the body. 
Ultimately, Badrichani’s work invites reflection on the interconnectedness between body and earth, between the ephemeral and the eternal, where the rhythms of nature—be it the foam of the sea or the contours of the body—become a shared narrative of life’s fleeting yet beautiful transformations. This ongoing dialogue between body and nature, time and transformation, shapes the philosophical core of her artistic practice, offering a visual language that resonates with the cycles of life we all experience.

In recent years, the artist’s work has been seen in group exhibitions at the Locker Room in Brooklyn, the Spring Break Art Show, during her residency on Governors Island, within the public institution LMCC, at the Untitled Space gallery and the Ki Smith gallery in New York, as well as in France, at the Esther et Paul gallery.
In July 2024 she was part of the collective exhibition Ghosts of The Mundane at the Nathalie Karg Annex Gallery in New York.