Ava de Courtivron: A Reversal of Tradition
Ava 'La Compasseresse' de Courtivron is a self taught mixed media analog collage artist whose works focus on themes of identity, nostalgia, and longing, as well as their effect on femininity, womanhood, and third wave feminism. Using the medium of collage as the glue that binds these experiences together, she hopes not only explore her own life and those who came before, but to also use the medium as a tool for storytelling, conservation, and contemplation of the major shifts of our lives as individuals, families, and societies.
How did your creative journey begin?
While I’ve always had some sort of artistic practice going on from a young age, starting with film photography, creative writing, and oil painting, I only relatively recently started doing analog collage. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was taking an oil painting elective at university and when the world (and all the art stores) shut down, teachers allowed us to experiment in other mediums to complete the course. A good friend of mine, Gabriela Motta (@gabeisinthehouseofart) who was also taking that class, had done collage for many years at that point and decided to work on those for her projects. When we did our class critiques, I was so impressed with her art and what she could do with collage, an artform I had never really considered before, I asked if she could give me a crash course in collage one weekend. I very quickly fell in love with the medium and ran with it. All these years later I’m still incredibly grateful she shared parts of her practice with me and that we still learn from, inspire, and encourage each other’s work.
How does collage help you connect your personal history with larger cultural narratives?
For me, these kinds of collages start with the photographs and images that call to me. I feel that photography and photographs are very contextual pieces of art and documentation, as the subject is defined in part by what it is surrounded by and the time the photo was taken. When I separate a ‘subject’ from its original context, I can transform it to take on new meaning through collage. In my “Personal Mythology” series, where I explore these themes of personal identity and identities within larger familial and cultural narratives (especially in the case of women,) the recontextualization of my ancestors’ and my own life’s path can be broken down, examined, compared to each other, and finally reassembled into a more complete story that spans over many generations, culture shifts and countries. Being able to explore these individual narratives through collage allows me to take these stories assembled over many years and combine them with a ‘modern’ understanding of why or how their lives went the way they did. I can then see, not only myself as part of a greater whole, but to see how the shifts in my own family directly reflect the changes of cultural norms in France over hundreds of years. In a lot of ways, I feel that through the study and artistic depiction of my own family and their lives, I’ve learned an extraordinary amount of history in order to truly understand where they fit in the historical narrative, and how their position in that narrative effected the other aspects of their lives and the conditions that eventually would lead to this generation and me.
What does a typical day in the studio look like for you, and how has your art practice grown or changed?
My practice has changed a lot from when I first started; I’m lucky enough to live right above a flea market, so for the first year or so I’d wake up on my free days, look through old magazines/books down there until I came across something that inspired me, grab a coffee, then go home and collage for hours at a time. During this more experimental time in my work, I was trying out what kinds of photos, themes, and other material I like to use in order to create, allowing me to make a large amount of collages in quick succession. At that time, individual images really spoke to me, and my focus was to find which cutting, gluing, and composition techniques would make the most interesting change to the original photo and let my subconscious speak through these choices.
Nowadays, between all the materials that I have from the market, the family/personal photos I incorporate, and the confidence I have in my personal aesthetic, collage feels both artistically and emotionally more expressive. My focus has since changed from subconscious expression and artistic development to a focus on purposeful storytelling, and connecting more with what images, symbols, and stories I draw from. While pieces may take longer, or I go through periods of creative highs and lows while I work through what I want to say or preserve in my work, I feel more connected to them and the sources of inspiration that call me to create than I did when I started.
Can you tell us about reclaiming the name La Compasseresse and what it means for your art practice?
La Compasseresse is the feminized version of the first part of my last name, Le Compasseur; I originally found that this name had been used by one of my ancestors, Jeanne, who lived in Paris during the 1400’s. When I first discovered her records, I thought it was incredible that this woman who was living in a time where women were not regarded as equal to their male counterparts or worthy of autonomy had her last name feminized and officially recognized/documented, even after her marriage. It made me wonder how many other women in my family (and in society generally,) had their legacies deemed as unimportant and thus they were lost to time and memory.
When I started my art career and wanted to find a unique name to go by, I immediately thought of La Compasseresse, I thought of it as a reversal of the tradition of female writers, artists and other creatives taking a man’s name as a pseudonym and as a way for me to carve a feminine name out of the masculine one I was given. It also represents 3 of the things that have come to inspire so many parts of my art: the inspiration and connection to French culture, my determination to see women and their contributions as legitimate and worthy of being remembered in families and society, and my own desire to create a ‘space’ for myself, my female ancestors, and maybe even one day my own descendants, to claim as their own in a naming system that rarely reflects us as women.
How has social media impacted your work?
When I started collaging, I was learning through a friend of mine and quickly became consumed in my own discovery of the medium, so I didn’t really use social media to look for inspiration or share my own work for at least the first year or so. I feel since I’ve started using it, it’s become a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it feels amazing to find community, admirers, opportunities, and of course, inspiration through it; there are so many opportunities I would have never seen and techniques I would have never thought of if it weren’t for social media and the other ‘online’ artists posting on it. On the other hand, I want to resist the urge of becoming overly influenced by what others are doing and in turn question my own work and aesthetic principals, especially in the online economy of likes, comments, followers, and reposts. I also feel that while I deeply admire the work of artists that document their process through TikTok’s/reels, I find it inauthentic in my own practice. Instead of focusing on collaging, I begin to think of the framing and lighting of the shot, if my workspace visually appealing or should I clean it before working, does this video look professional or amateurish? My collage process is so messy and spread out over my workspace, and I’m constantly getting up to look for things or stretch; filming it proves to not only be impractical for me, but also it takes me out of the zone of creating and more into a marketing/PR mindset.
In what ways do you see feminism shaping both the themes and methods of your work?
While I feel that any choice a woman can make is inherently political and accessible due to the wins of past feminists, I feel a special connection to feminism and other women through the medium of collage, mixed media, and fiber arts through both theme and form. In terms of subject matter, even if the ‘theme’ or story I’m trying to tell isn’t always a direct statement about women or feminism, my work uses a lot of reappropriated, and at times, explicit imagery of women and captures my perspective of them through a female gaze, allowing for new ‘female led’ narratives shine through media that is typically catered to a male audience. As for form, about a year after I discovered collage I was very interested in its origins and researched/wrote an article about how despite the popular belief that Picasso or Braque invented collage in the early 1900’s, women had been collaging since at least the 1770’s using early photography, scrap wallpaper, and watercolors to make these works, as well as practicing the more ‘traditional’ arts of sewing, knitting and embroidery to create and express themselves. This allows for my art and the art of other women in these mediums to be in direct conversation with past and future generations of female artists as we build on, inspire, and reinvent these mediums that were practiced by and passed down between us.
(Article here: https://www.lacompasseresse.com/conversing-with-the-void/the-feminist-history-of-collage)
How has living in Paris influenced your artistic voice and connection to your ancestors?
For so many aspects of my life, the city of Paris has been a huge source of inspiration, it was the first city I ever fell in love with and was the city that generations of my family had lived in. Incredibly, the year I moved here (2016) my university handled assigning apartments to students, and I’ll never forget looking up the address of my place and finding out it was a 20 minute walk from the apartment my grandparents lived in and across the street from the Parc Monceau, the park that the last 3 generations of my family played in as children; it was as if my late grandparents had picked the apartment out for me to be able to live ‘close by’ to them and show me their neighborhood. It felt like it was fate or divine intervention that I ended up in that apartment and in the city and every year that passes there are more coincidences like this one that reassure me that my ancestors are guiding me and I’m where I’m meant to be.
As for my art, the first book I used to cut from was my friend’s thrifted version of Taschen’s Paris. Portrait of a City, and despite using it for over 5 years, I still feel that I discover new photos and ideas every time I look through it. Since then, I have collected many thrifted photo books about the city and try to exclusively use photos of Paris to create cityscapes in my work. In using the city as the main setting for most of my pieces, I feel that I give back and contribute to the city’s artistic heritage that has developed over the centuries and reconnect with my ancestors through portraying their lives as well as my own as intrinsically intertwined with Paris itself.