Ninon Hivert captures the poetics of discarded objects in sculptures and collages — Colossal

In Ninon Hivert’s multimedia works, the afterlife of objects is an unfolding story – discarded objects retain memories of the body, its gestures and its relationship to the environment. She works like an archaeologist, patiently observing before re-translating found objects, capturing the textures of contemporary urban life in the process.

Sievert’s research on forgotten objects began by documenting photographs and later in clay sculptures, documenting the uncertain gestures of discarded clothing. In her most recent work, she has broadened her focus to more universal, everyday objects. She isolates artifacts in moments of abandonment, clarifying the contours of the presence left behind.

If the present is built on constant change from the future to the past, then Sievert’s work captures the power of this elusive state. Like grain becoming spirit, her work is a process of distillation. The quality of the object changes slightly each time it is recaptured in a new medium, ultimately extracting something timeless from the unsuspecting in-between moment.

Hivert’s latest exhibition, Ce Qui Est, Ce Qui Sera, Ce Qui Fut. (“That is, that will be, that already is.”) takes place in the 14th Church of Paris, bringing ongoing themes in her work into new materials and themes.

Stacks of flattened cardboard and clothing bags are compressed into ceramic cubes, their raised surfaces recording the tension of containment. Hivert’s glass bubble wrap sculpture half day Series shelves – for fragile items, acting as protective shells for missing items. Nearby is a cast bronze work glove, commemorating gestures of past labor. In the background, a torn collage recalls those weathered palimpsests of Wheat Sauce ads that lay somewhere between demolition and renewal.

Engaged in bronze and Will Sauce— a glass-forming technique made from molten glass powder — alongside clay, photography, and collage, Hivert manipulates the dialogue between material and environment with precision. These recent projects are conceptually rigorous and visually striking. Hivit explained:

For the glass, after modeling the bubble wrap in clay, a molding process was added, introducing new gestures, new steps and successive states of matter in this translation. The final result is half day For me, it was serendipity: I ended up with a sculpture that was solid but translucent, and when light passed through it, the dark matter inside disappeared, as if I’d caught a shadow.

Sievert’s observation evokes both tenderness and criticism. While her work embraces a poetics of transition, it also alludes to the viewer’s consumption cycles. What happens when an object is no longer used and becomes waste? When do functional objects cease to be visible, and what remains in that invisible interval?

Sievitt illuminates this fragile “middle ground,” illustrating the autonomy of transitional states. The result is a series of discarded works that are neither mourned nor admired. Hivert allows the material to persist in ambiguity, occupying time in different ways. These forms quietly and persistently evoke the past and the future: holding temporality together through the ever-renewing gesture of the present.

Ce Qui Est, Ce Qui Sera, Ce Qui Fut. Held from October 10 to December 20 at the 14th Chapel in Paris. Learn more on Hivert’s website or Instagram.

Georgia E. Norton de Matos is a Colossal guest writer reporting from Paris.