Charles Senard

My practice explores the tension between the impermanence of “nature” and the human desire to preserve, organize, and control it. I work with organic materials to make scents, lights, prints, sculptures, and installations that create emotional, atmospheric environments. Using materials such as clay, beeswax, plants, ash, wood, natural pigments, copper, and natural textiles, I experiment with processes of preservation, transformation, and display. I’m interested in how humans aestheticize nature and emotionally frame it through designed environments, museums, gardens, archives, and wellness spaces.

I’m not trying to recreate real nature. I’m interested in how nature becomes transformed into something staged, preserved, isolated, and designed. My installations exist somewhere between a natural landscape, a scientific archive in a constructed sensory environment and letting the natural cycle of change, of decomposition/oxidation happen. Beauty is very important in my work, but I approach it critically. I’m interested in why humans feel the need to aestheticize nature and create emotional comfort through controlled environments. The work reflects this desire to preserve fleeting moments of beauty while simultaneously revealing the systems of control, display, and construction behind them. Recently, my practice has also started moving closer toward spatial and interior design. I’ve become increasingly interested in how atmosphere, materiality, light, scent, tactility, and natural forms can shape how people emotionally experience a space. Rather than seeing installation, sculpture, and interior space as separate disciplines, I increasingly approach them as part of the same sensory and spatial language.