The best advice

Installation at the Art Center for the collective exhibition ‘Laissez parler les petits papiers’ (‘Let the little papers speak’), Noumea, New Caledonia (2019). Work in residence financed and supported by the City of Noumea.

For the project, Alix Lucas proposes to use paper to convey positive messages of mutual help. In a world where the majority of knowledge is transmitted via digital screens, the artist wants to refocus paper as a medium of exchange and sharing.

She went spontaneously to question the public in various places and encouraged the people she met to write on paper the best advice ever received. She shot each advice she collected. These shots were then carefully printed using the hand-crafted process of cyanotype, a 19th-century photographic reproduction technique that reacts to UV light. The use of UV light in her artwork made sense to the artist, since the UV index in New-Caledonia is one of the highest of the world and she wanted to make to use this characteristic in the artistic process.

Each print has a different blue variation depending on the weather and UV power, making each message unique.

All of these 42 prints offer the opportunity for the public to get inspired, connect with some of them and perhaps apply them in their daily lives.