Born in 1993 in Valence (France)
Lives and works in Grenoble (France)

A sound and performance artist, Alma Sauret-Small is also a musician and a trained fine furniture maker. Her visual art approach is attuned to her viola da gamba playing practice and to her theoretical research into music and language as well as into woodcraft techniques. She stages performances which interrogate gestures acquired and passed on by learning, or which explore language in her translation games and sound variations. Attentive to the materiality of processes, Sauret-Small focuses at length on the subtleties of the instrument, the wood or the performer’s body. In this way, she probes the concrete aspect of work and the gestures it involves – the workbench, the tool, the tones and hesitations that are specific to crafting reality, augmented by a curiously distinctive poetry.

For Archéologie d’une note, the artist has set up part of her studio in the exhibition space, where she will gradually make a viola da gamba. In showing a process of self-contained artisanal production, she considers the specific nature of creating art compared to rationalised technical work.