Biography

Graphic and plastic artist and author born in Paris, Joëlle Dautricourt conducts a research and an artistic experimentation at the sources of writing. 

From her adolescence, she wrote poems and composed songs that she performed while accompanying herself on the guitar. In 1972 her first collection entitled Le Louvoyage (poems and songs written from the age of twelve to fifteen) was printed, registered with the Régie du Dépôt Légal under number 117410. Her second collection of poetry, Ébauche d'une Mosaïque, was published in 1975 by the Éditions Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the Miroir Oblique collection.

After her studies of Classical and Modern Literature at the Sorbonne, she met the avant-garde movements at the Galerie St Petri Archive of Experimental and Marginal Art opened by Jean Sellem at Lund in Sweden, and she is conducting since 1979 a research and an experimentation around the question "What is Writing?", from the symbols birth to the new technologies in computer graphics. In the early 80's, she gave illustrated lectures on the history of writing entitled Writing Systems of the World and engaged at the same time poetic plastic experiments on physics and dynamics of writing, through Drawings-Writing, Imaginary Writings, Graphic Formulas and Black Books. With Written Bones, she discovered that "shape and matter in bone are a slow and same thought" (in Joëlle Dautricourt, Sculptures, Paris, 1986). Then from rubber stamp to copy art, she expressed "in two words, creation" as Gladys Fabre wrote, in the artworks generation Wordwork realized between 1992 and 1996. WORD is food for WORK.

She exhibits since 1980 in France, especially at the Galerie Peinture Fraîche and at the Women's literary Café Barcarosse, then at the Galerie Antoine Candau in 1987, at the Champs-Elysées Canon Center in 1996 sponsored by Canon to produce a serie of copy art works, at Microsoft France in 1997, and at the Musée de l'Abbaye Sainte-Croix des Sables d'Olonne in 1998 after an artist residence. She participates also in many group exhibitions in Italy, in Japan, and in United States in Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry collection as well as in the exhibitions "Women of the Book" organized by Judith Hoffberg. She has realized a lot of performances using voice, tracing, and movement, notably at the 1st Grand Palais Book Fair and Georges Pompidou Center Artist Book Manifesto in 1981, and at the 1st Paris Performances Festival at the Galerie Donguy in 1982.

From 1995 to 1997, she obtained a training in computer graphics and new technologies of image and sound at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. At the dawn of the year 2000, she launched her first website on the Internet, Workshop of Scripturality. In 2002, she co-signed with Sophie Charrier the launch online of Big Bang Fäerie, the first web optical theatre created by Big Bang Art Inner Mouvement.

Since the end of the 90's, she has been exploring scripturality and graphic poetry in the double filiation of the book and typography avant-gardes and of the copyists of Scriptural art, and she received in 1999 the 1st award for artistic creation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. In 2006, she realized a decorative glass window in memory of child victims of the Holocaust for the building of the Center Maayan new synagogue. Her work The Book of the Happy Writing was exhibited at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris in 2010, at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York in 2012, at the Temple Beth-El in Great Neck in 2012, and at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York in 2013. The U.S magazine Moment put the work on the front page of its May/June 2012 issue which has devoted to it an 8 pages article. In June 2013, the work was presented in video projection during a lecture by the artist at the Academy Art Museum of Easton, Maryland.

Nanto, her emblem of Gallic village created for the 12th Conviviales Art Cinema Rurality of Nannay in Nièvre, was inaugurated in August 2012.

In October 2017, Joëlle Dautricourt completed The Happy Writing, a literary work composed of texts that punctuate her quest for complementarity between graphic expression and verbal expression. The book was published in June 2020 by Sens Public. She now also gathers her artist's writings since 1978.

Complete CV

Web Archive Site : Workshop of Scripturality

Web Theatre Site : Big Bang Fäerie

La Maison des Artistes

ADAGP :  Artist rights management for Joëlle Dautricourt works