Sylvia Charbonnier

Sylvia Charbonnier artist and photographer

Sylvia Charbonnier, a French-born visual artist, creates cyanotypes that explore the ubiquity of plastic pollution. Her works blend plastic waste with botanicals, evoking underwater worlds and addressing environmental destruction through layered altered blue tones.
From: Nürnberg, Germany
Shows: Cyanotypes

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Sylvia Charbonnier is a visual artist and graphic designer born in France who is currently living in Germany. She studied painting and illustration at the Peck School of the Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and exhibited both in the US and Germany.

Sylvia Charbonnier’s initial focus on painting, collage and mixed media later expanded to experimenting with alternative photographic processes. The emotional qualities of the multiple ranges of blues that can be achieved with the cyanotype process, as well as the water-like shapes attained through various techniques, strongly reminded her of underwater worlds. Having explored and been deeply touched by the beauty of the marine environment, coupled with the imminent threat of the destructive effects caused by plastic pollution, led her to this recent body of work.

Sylvia Charbonnier’s cyanotypes revolve around the topic of plastic and its ubiquity. In her works, plastic products have become detached from their original functionality and purpose, lingering in the images, mingling with other elements, or, in some cases, taking on unpredictable forms.

The cyanotypes made with actual as well as photographs of plastic waste from her household, such as pasta packages and freezer bags sometimes mixed with botanicals, have been altered during and after exposure with various analogue methods to create different shapes and shades of blue. Some pieces have been partially hand-colored before or after making the print.

“Having a background in painting, where outcomes are more predictable and reproducible to some extent, Cyanotype has taught me to let go of controlling the outcome too much, watch the image unfold, and follow my intuition as I make new decisions on how to further develop my work until I feel it has reached the emotional value I am striving for at that moment.”

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