L'ABC de l'eau

«I have often made delightful journeys, embarked on a word in the abysses of the past, like the insect that floats on a river on a blade of grass.» Honoré de Balzac


“Water” rocked me for days, and, like a canoe drifting in the sinuosity of a river, I let myself be carried along by its waves. In the course of my ramblings, this word in my head became a sound: O. A sound, a letter, a second, a third… the alphabet flows naturally… and thus, the ABC of WATER was born. I then fished through the literature for twenty-seven book titles with the word “water” in them, focusing on the genre: novel, poem, essay. Words flow naturally from the images… that I create in etching on the title pages of these books. I intervene with different approaches to the literary work. Sometimes the novel is a source of inspiration for the drawing, sometimes I divert the title or it becomes the title of my image… I try, each time, to show the richness of water, its essentiality, its plurality. Here and there, the whole thing is punctuated with winks and tributes to the history of art, ancient, modern and contemporary. Water has always been a source of inspiration…

Gaëlle Callac

Born in 1972 in Lannion, France