Cécile Raynal-Diarra

Joséphine Baker loved her country and Paris. Cécile Raynal-Diarra loves dance and sculpture. A free electron in perpetual rotation around two centres of interest that are different in texture but both centred on the body, Cécile Raynal-Diarra, steeped in European and African cultures, likes to play on paradoxes and complementarities to encourage encounters. 

A veritable benchmark in African dance, this 37-year-old from Château-Thierry in the Paris suburbs is also a talented sculptor.  A graduate of the Beaux-Arts, this nomad of the arts, who lives in the countryside around Le Havre, has a slim yet solid athletic figure. She devotes herself to the pleasure of clay, her favourite material, which she tempers, soaks, works, kneads and models according to the people she meets. Grave, serene, enigmatic, Cécile’s busts are very characteristic. Firstly, because they ‘undergo’ a very specific firing process at 900°C, which gives them a black, burnt appearance that evokes the strange, an almost ghostly presence; and secondly, because they all seem imperceptibly real, frozen of course, but still somewhat alive, a little like the trapped figures of Pompeii, but without any morbid connotations.

Source and more information: http://fillesmalesfest.free.fr/article.php3?id_article=10