Jean-Luc Cornec

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Born 1955 in Lannilis, France. Lives and works in Heidel­berg, Germany

 

The artist on his Telephone Sheep:

"My working process consists of a playful combination of elements, objects, words and letter – a play with concepts and perception. At first sight, the grey telephones, today out of use, don’t have anything to do with the head of a sheep. I cannot say when and how this association came to me; it only works when combining the telephone with the cables as wool, the earphones as feet and the individualistic expressions of the different sheep. Even if I was afraid of the overly humorous aspect of my initial idea, I continued shaping it and finally I was surprised to realize that during the artistic process new options had emerged; for instance, I had never thought that the ringing of the phone could remind of the “baa” of the sheep.

 

The idea was, in the beginning, formal-aesthetic, but open for different entries, other approaches or possible interpretations. The sheep is a kind of archetype, with various significations in different religions, languages and cultures. When Dolly was born in 1996, the work was charged with another meaning; in a way, the work was “reloaded” on different levels. It became a comment on the relation between the original and the copy. When I realized that the filmBlade runner was based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philipp K. Dick, the installation became a materialization of the ecological question. And finally, thinking about Wikileaks and the NSA scandal, the accent is put on the importance of communication and interconnectedness.