About the artist
“I make my art starting from the material act of handicraft, of handling matter. Putting things in the oven, carefully watching how colours transform through natural chemical processes into different textures. This semi traditional way of working is also present in the form of my art. It is inspired by early, Greek, African, Asian and pre-Columbian art. Not that I really copy traditional statues or tribal styles, but I reinvent them for my own processing of matter, from my memory, my vague nostalgia of a continents that I visited and yearn to re-visit. I always try to make primordial figures, humans in their most naked, primitive being, as tokens of some basic existential condition: loneliness, fear and desire. For me making is a process, a stream. I hope they convey a sort of solidified ecstasy. Even if the joy of life is by nature fleeting and transient, art should capture it in an enduring, eternal way.”
Etiyé Dimma Poulsen
Sculptor
1968 Born in Ethiopia
1974 Adopted in Tanzania
1975 English school in Kenya
1982 Primary and secondary school in Denmark
1988 Art history school in Denmark
1991 Installs her workshop in France
2003 Installs her workshop and lives in Belgium
Museums Collections
Cantor arts center Stanford University (USA)
Musée national de céramique-Sèvres (France)
The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (US)
Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art (US)
Hans Bogatzke , Collection of contemperary African art-Allemagne
Newark Museum New Jersey (US)
Hood Museum Hanover New Hampshire (US)
La Piscine Musée d’art Roubaix France
World bank Washington Collection
Musée Théodore Deck Guebwiller (France)
Chemin des Arts Saint-Aubin Château Neuf (France)
Television
2003
‘double je’ Bernard Pivot
Trophées of the French language
‘Couleurs noirs’ Film of Bérengère Casanova
France
T.V. Brussels Belgium
Film
2000
'Etiyé Dimma Poulsen'
2005
Femmes du Feu./ women of fire