In the “Etang de Rivery”, a group of buoys floats on the surface of the water. With flashy colours, the colourful group that the visual artist Mary Sue has innocently posed on the water raises the incredulous gaze of passers-by and locals. Despite its playful and light appearance, the work is the messenger of serious facts: a memorial as shimmering as it is sinister, its hundreds of floats remind us that two children die every day drowned in the Mediterranean, in a vain attempt to get to Europe… The inflatable buoy, a playful and vital object, is thus transformed into the witness of a tragic actuality, while the frontiers of the Hortillonnages refer to those of the European continent, in a cruel metaphor of migratory flows and their fatal consequences.

Born in 1979 and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, artist Mary Sue uses the heroes of our childhood to create troubling works marked by ambivalence. Straddled between the imaginary and the real, their smooth and colourful aesthetic tends towards the absurd and puts the spotlight on disturbing realities.