Originally from the Netherlands, Noortje Piccer studied art in Maastricht before moving to France in the early 80s. It took a long time before she was able to let her artist’s soul speak. “Being in the light was terrible, what we show is intimate”. But over the years, the sculptor has found her way to express herself, to evoke nature and humanity.

Her eye rests on a pebble, a leather strap, a piece of glass, a tire, a piece of wood picked up on the banks of the Durance, a metal sheet altered by time that she stores in her workshop in Mallemort. The artist likes to combine materials, wood, steel, metal. She manipulates, observes, lets infuse before giving life to her sculptures marked by poetry. These take place in the galleries as well as inside the castle of Charleval in ochre tones that remind her of rust, omnipresent in her work. “In rust there is a really magical palette of colours and a side that we do not always master”.