Dress the Monster with Ornaments: Level 5, 2025

Dress the Monster with Ornaments: Level 5 focuses on the fifth floor of the Musée d’Orsay, which houses the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collections. As with the rest of the project, I visited the museum daily, tracing visitor movement through the galleries and recording moments of pause, congestion, and disorientation. The drawing is threaded with fragments of overheard conversation, many of which express confusion, impatience, or the difficulty of navigating a space shaped by crowds, expectation, and fame.

Against the rectilinear logic of the museum’s architecture, I introduced organic visual fragments drawn from Gauguin’s White Horse. These elements interrupt the floor plan and echo the sensory and emotional overload experienced by visitors. Alongside raised phones, blocked sightlines, and paintings ignored in favour of more recognisable works, the drawing reflects on how attention, hierarchy, and desire structure the contemporary encounter with art, revealing the museum as a lived, bodily, and social environment rather than a neutral container.