Humility
of celestial bodies
Stéphanie Sagot
Stéphanie Sagot – Stéphanie Sagot – an art of love at the service of the Earth and the cosmos
Paul Ardenne
Stéphanie Sagot defines herself as "artist, art lecturer, lover of the land and the ocean, meditating and daughter and granddaughter of an oyster farmer. His works address ecology and the love of the Earth from a realistic, didactic and emotional angle. For her, the environment must be approached in a fusional way.
The title of this exhibition, "Humility of the celestial bodies," derives from the etymology of the word "humility," in relation to humus, the nourishing and fecundating earth. As for the evocation of the «celestial bodies», it refers to the great whole, in which we participate on Earth, all organisms included, from the most humble to the most notorious. Stéphanie Sagot specifies, during one of her exhibitions, opened in Stuttgart, at the Pyrohaus, 'Voyage en Terres Amoureuses' (19 July - 30 November 2025): “Since 2023, I have been developing the archpélic work Terres amoureuses, a concrete cosmogony reengaging territories and feelings, earth and tenderness. This 19th-century French expression refers to a land loosened and made fertile [and is] derived from an ancient use of the word 'amour', which defines a fertile land. It disappeared from the French dictionaries in 1928 while intensive agriculture spread and recalls the forgotten importance of the precious organic link to the earth (...).
At the time of space ambitions, these loving Lands celebrate Earth and life. They invite us to feel the mystery of the cosmos that inhabits us.
Take care of the Everything and the Here
The plastic works of Stéphanie Sagot take various forms, with this recurrence however, large drawings full of multiple details having the value of pedagogical boards – a work that she presents in this autumn 2025, at the Sorbonne Artgallery. Evoke, as this artist invites here, the awakening to the natural world, the wounds suffered by the environment, the landscape and peasant universe and the violence recorded against them: this modulation, poetic, is also openly political and concerned,
'concerned' about the future of the human and non-human world at the time of climate change.
The vocation of art by Stéphanie Sagot, schematically? Highlight both the very nature of landscapes and the sensitivity that they can activate in us, notably when they are subject to predation or degradation. Artistic expression, in this logic, calls for appeased relationships with the living understood in an expanded way: the terrestrial biotope, of which humans, the mineral, the cosmic, in a holistic perspective, since everything depends on everything. The aim of the artist, supported by related works, inciters, denunciators or worthy of tribute, joins the concern for care, "care": to reshape the world, to make it a more liveable space, to promote the best possible health for everyone and for everything, in the spirit of the "One Health" concept, a common, shared health
Playing with hypocritical speeches and faux-nez
In parallel with a dynamic personal career dedicated to promoting openness to a better and more ethical world, Stéphanie Sagot created in 2016, in collaboration with Suzanne Husky, the New Ministry of Agriculture, on a simulationist mode and this time, more caustic. «New Ministry of Agriculture»? This institution, in fact, does not exist. The artists have nevertheless brought it to life through a website that looks like a digital portal emanating from the French Republic and significant creations, with an ecological spirit, in this perspective: encourage the visitor to the site to turn back the clock-pile the official proposals when they are hypocritical. Again and in the same stride, suggest this alternative, be wary or even distrust of the official discourse and proposals from above, too often misleading. Among the creations of the New Ministry of Agriculture, let us particularly mention the watercolor series Éléments de langage (since 2022), a painted reproduction of photographs devoted to important figures from the global political world involved in planting trees, as a sign of exemplarity, and posing in front of the photographers – these same figures, Margaret Thatcher, Donald Trump, Nicolas Sarkozy or even Emmanuel Macron... whose action in favor of ecology remains questionable or even deemed unfriendly.
This book, which counters propaganda, is complemented in a different form by L'Aventure du vivant: géoingénierie verte, created by Stéphanie Sagot in collaboration with Suzanne Husky as part of their new Ministry of Agriculture. The adventure of the living: green geoengineering, a 250 x 250 cm watercolor cowhide, is presented in a singular way under the species of an Amerindian bovine skin hanging from a wooden portico. Undisguised evocation of indigenous culture than this one, and in the background, of its ecological wisdom. Equivalent of an educational but anachronistic board, as if shifted in time, this skin is adorned with multiple drawings that refer to current practices or studied by American geo-engineering research centers supposed to support the fight against air pollution, the destruction of soils and environmental impoverishment. Stéphanie Sagot and Suzanne Husky, to create this work borrowed the title
"The adventure of the living" to a great training plan for future farmers set up by the State, robotized and mechanized agriculture with the air of video games... The artists point out all the hypocritical dimension of this program in reality extractivist and signaled by practices more harmful than virtuous for the environment. As Lauranne Germond writes (in the catalog of the exhibition L'eau et le diamant, presented in 2023 at the headquarters of Société générale, in La Défense), this work 'draws up an inventory of these geo-engineering, climate manipulation systems currently being tested in order to combat global warming', even though 'their dangerousness is recognized'.
Amor Mundi
One will detect, in the profuse and multidirectional work to date of Stéphanie Sagot, a multifaceted creation also familiar from art-science relations, mystical thought, and natural sciences – the expression of a humanism not transcendental but immanent, active on the scale of the present, of the near as well as the distant geographical and mental. What to understand? The art thus envisaged cannot be a pure abstraction, a vaporous flow, a flight as far as possible from the current world and its realities and necessities, primarily environmental. On the contrary, it must focus on concrete efficiency. This sensitive commitment is inseparable from a motivated project that in this case drives these two powerful engines, the love of life and the concern for its best possible preservation.
Where art saves, to its measure.