Hike along the long coastline of the Atlantic . In addition to waves, gravel and offshore creatures, it may also pass countless "beautiful rags".
Song Xiaoke, started four years ago, she hiked along the Atlantic coast to pick up scattered goods. I encountered huge group of stone sculptures, abandoned houses, RVs, and beaches full of fossils, agate , but the encounter that made her even more tempting was a rag that no one cares about by the sea:
suspected to be the jaw of dolphin , the number plate of the crematorium, spike objects like the tail of alien creatures, and countless coral , shells, fossils, floating wood...
and other strange and useless things, through her clever combination, became the only one of the world's only one piece of jewelry, and reborn.
Maybe there is no real junk in the world.
hiking 1000km along the Atlantic Ocean
What will happen?
"Wedding Photo" of Song Xiaoke and Dahai
"Professional picking up rags."
This is Song Xiaoke's self-introduction on social media. "I like this more than the name of an artist."
"Tripped" she picked up by the beach
Necklace made of "Tripped"
scavengers, she has another identity: an art student at the Nantes Academy of Fine Arts in France.
Nante is a sea-side city in northwest France. Xiaoke's residence is about fifty kilometers away from the nearest sea. When she was free, she liked to walk by the beach and observe the sea in different states, which were changing a lot.
Today, she has been hiking along the Atlantic coast for four years, traveling more than 1,000 kilometers, from north to south, and almost all the coasts near her city.
Focusing on walking for a long time can effectively eliminate anxiety. Every time she got home after hiking, she felt extremely calm.
There are different seas left in her album
Brittany, too many shallows, a dead silent, desolate, sad, and a shriveled old man. I still love the sea and beaches of Loire region . I am a woman in her prime, gentle, powerful, rich and irresistible.
If you walk a lot, you will inevitably have some wonderful encounters: the coast full of fossil agate, a broken statue, an abandoned house, a car, and a house, there are traces of the former owner's life remaining. Xiaoke explores around and pieces together and restores the life here bit by bit in his mind.
Abandoned house and RV
A broken statue I met
Once she hiked past a place called Saint-Malo on the western coast, where there was a large group of rustic and vivid stone sculptures scattered on the beach.
They were from the priest Adolphe Julien Fouéré. After losing part of his hearing, he came here alone and used hammers and chisels to carve hundreds of strange and amazing sculptures to form the strange scenery of this beach. When
was still in China, Xiaoke heard about this story. Unexpectedly, I happened to walk by a few years later and saw these giant stone sculptures with my own eyes.
The stone sculpture group by the sea
climbing reefs and walking on dangerous shoals, she joked that the road she took was "basically not for people to walk." She had experienced thrilling moments: half of her body fell into a swamp, and in desperation, she raised her foot hard and knelt in. The seaside is deserted, the signal disappears, and there is no need to ask for help.
A few seconds later, Xiaoke realized that she wanted to follow nature. She slowly moved horizontally and finally escaped from danger. Because she couldn't guarantee the safety of others, she chose to hike alone.
Fortunately, she had almost never encountered real danger. "Part of the reason is that I have a deep awe of nature."
I found that I can only calm down when I walk on the coastline and climb the reefs. Walking for a long time, eating very little things and drinking very little water, just walking. Walking makes people concentrate, and walking makes people exhausted.
Later, her hike had one more task: picking up rags. Because she likes to walk with her head down, she can always meet some "baby" on the beach.If you meet someone you like, pick it up and go home.
What's amazing is that she has never met any other scavengers in four years. Only once or twice, some volunteers picked up plastic garbage on the beach.
Harvest on the beach
Sky, sea, beach, a scavenger. This slightly lonely picture fills the gaps in Xiaoke's life. "For a long time, picking up things while walking was the only thing that made me happy."
"Baby" on the beach
Xiaoke's beautiful rags
Like any beach in the world, there are many rags that are easily overlooked scattered along the Atlantic coast.
But Xiaoke felt that there was very little real garbage on the beach she hiked. The most common ones are plastic baits or ship parts. I found broken airplane cups twice. "Maybe there are two sad stories behind them"; I have also encountered shipwreck wreckage, "but they are not garbage, they are monuments."
In addition, what Xiao Ke picked up on the beach can be said to be beautiful treasures: sea iron trees, bones, shells, fossils, stones, beautiful tiles fragments, rusty metal artifacts, floating wood, sea glass ...
● The fossils picked up. The lower right corner is the first time Xiaoke picked up wood fossils
The winter after the storm, which is her favorite day to hike and pick up scattered goods. "The weather here is often bad in winter, and you will likely get a lot of harvest after a storm. And summer is always sunny and boring, and there will be more people, which makes people irritated."
There is no one around the beach after the storm. She listens to music while walking, and dances as she walks.
The beach after the storm
picked up fossils and bones, which made Xiaoke the most excited. When she first picked up the fossil, she happily laughed and jumped on the beach. But not all beautiful rags will attract her.
During the pickup process, I will only choose natural objects that do not appear in a normal posture or have defects, while those that look too normal and beautiful will not enter my choice range.
The mandible of the suspected dolphin
Xiaoke shared with us some wonderful objects she picked up: a ceramic brand with a number engraved in the crematorium, a long and spiked object that was suspected to be a dolphin, and a long and spiked object that could not be identified. "I feel that the tail of a creature is like an alien creature."
The "alien creature tail" with a sharp thorn
● The front is the number, and the back is the French word for "crematorium". "I don't know what kind of person its owner was once, and how it drifted here."
She joked that she seemed to have some kind of mysterious radar , who could find the treasures needed in a pile of stones, debris, and aquatic plants. What can you pick up on any beach on
? She knows it carefully: "There are many fossils on a certain area of the north. There are basically nothing in the northwest, only ordinary shells. There are many sea iron trees and relatively many bones in the west. There are more drifting trees in the southwest. There are many stones and many treasures because they can be stuck."
The beaches on the north coast are covered with fossil agate
In order to leave room for backpackers for the rags, Xiaoke does not bring any equipment and even brings very little food. But picking up scavengers still depend on luck. When you are not lucky, you can only pick up one or two of them all day long.
● When picking up scattered on weekends, the shells picked up and the unknown thousand-layered
In addition to the beach, sometimes she would also walk in the open space next to her home, where cut down trees were piled up. She often picked up small pieces of wood and bark of strange shapes. When you open the inner side of the bark, there will occasionally be beautiful patterns caused by insects.
Patterns
Use rag as creative materials
Shell collar
Handmade is a treatment that calms me down for the time being.
The habit of picking up rags was a long time ago. I used to pick it up in the mountains, but now I pick it up by the beach. These beautiful rags brought her a lot of artistic conception , and the idea of "turning waste into treasure" ran through her career.
She started learning to draw since she was a very young child. She left Chengdu at the age of 15 to go to the Affiliated Middle School of the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Then she entered the graphic department of Central Academy of Fine Arts in . After graduation, she went to the Nantes Academy of Fine Arts in France to continue studying art.
● "Resurgam I will get up again". Xiaoke’s domestic undergraduate graduation work
When she graduated from China, she made many small monsters with mud and natural materials, and built a place for them. She used wood to frame the frame and pasted the picked bark on it.
When she graduated from France from undergraduate studies, she combined the wood she picked up with artificial metal objects to create another form of "biology".
Later, she studied for graduate school, and almost all her works revolve around hiking plans, including the masterpiece "Bone Book". She put the bones she picked up in the plaster, half of which were the bones themselves and half of which were indentations of the bones.
"Bone Book"
The inspiration is the Spirit Bone Tower. I like to visit the cemetery for no reason. The cemetery here is beautiful. I don’t feel scared or uncomfortable at all, but I feel very comfortable. Every time I go to a new place, I go to see the oldest cemetery in the area. After graduation, she continued to create with tattered rags, turning broken shells, bones, and fossils into rings, necklaces, and earrings.
has never learned design, so she started working based on her ideas and enthusiasm. This kind of inner-driven creation gives her a long-lost sense of freedom. "I finally don't have to make up stories to deal with the teacher. It's great, just do it if you want."
● "Eternal Heart" is a creation that Xiaoke likes more
Just to appreciate these lonely jewelry that only one piece in the world, it is hard to imagine that Xiaoke did it in a lack of any equipment and tools.
Fortunately, she didn't plan to over-treat the material. Take the rags home, wash them with running water, brush them with toothbrush, and then polish the pricking area. It's all right. Try not to do any extra treatment and retain the form of the rags themselves.
Witch necklace
Haiti Tree Bracelet and Ring
More jewelry made by Xiaoke (slide left)
Don’t draw sketches. Just take a look at the materials and Xiaoke’s mind can depict the roughly finished product. "It is best to make things that are incomplete. It is difficult to have room for development for something that is particularly perfect. You will feel that everything you do is redundant."
She is especially fond of filling in the broken junk.
The voids formed by sand and gravel are filled with metal and ore, or the relief effect made by herself, prints . The prints record the waves, foams and reefs she saw on foot, as well as the sea gods and sea monsters that fascinated her.
Use copper, brass and silver to fill
copper prints hidden in bones and fossils
Filling for me is an action that can give objects a new life. It is still it, but it exists in a different way, it does not die. I asked myself why I like incomplete objects, maybe because I don’t agree with perfect objects/persons in my heart. That is a false existence for me, it is very boring and I have no interest in understanding.
The second life of objects
Xiaoke spliced the junk together
Due to the epidemic and funding, the Atlantic hiking plan has been interrupted twice. In March 2020, France began to lock down the city. Xiaoke, who could not go out, had to use materials and tools within his reach to create.
's hobby for making handmade paper has sprouted since she was still in the Academic Academy of Fine Arts. After France was locked down, she picked it up again.
Handmade paper made by Xiaoke
She uses the egg box and toilet paper at home to make handmade paper. Add water, break it through the mixer, and use a large colander to remove a thin layer of pulp and drain it. Take one liter every day, and one liter ten times, each time for six minutes. "In this way, my day was divided into many blocks and it passed quickly."
On the first day of unblocking, she took handmade paper to the open space next to her home with handmade paper to bask in the sun.
Handmade paper made of egg boxes and toilet paper
Compared to jewelry, making handmade paper requires the same amount of patience, but it has to face more uncertainty. "You can also let all kinds of accidents be ignored, and there may be surprises in the end."
Once, Xiaoke placed a small box of straw slurry outside the window to dry. He thought it would become as moldy as before, but unexpectedly, more than ten days later, unexpected beautiful patterns appeared on the paper, as well as many small worms that had turned into dry shells. She guessed that there must be a small flying worm laying eggs inside. After hatching, the small worm crawled on the straw slurry, leaving a mark.
"After they helped me complete these patterns, their lives ended."
Traces left by the little worm
Through handmade paper made by herself, she has extended many works, such as plant specimens, and pasted dried flower specimens collected when traveling in different places.
Shell Plant Specimen Set
She also made the cover of her graduate "paper" with handmade paper. The
"paper" includes a collection of photography, which are the various animals she photographed during her hike. The final folding part describes the big and small cities she has walked through. She named the album "Elegy".
The cover of "paper" made by hand-made paper
is handmade to calm Xiaoke down. She admitted that she was a high-tech idiot and even felt a headache when editing pictures, but handmade things seemed like a "treatment" - both for herself and for the items she picked up.
I do things to calm myself down and relieve some mental pain. It's hard for me to say what I can present to the audience. I just enjoyed that process and threw aside and never looked at it again after I finished it.
Some people may want their works to be kept well as they are, but I am more happy to see them change over time and environment. Even if it is incomplete or discolored, it is their due state, and they will be repeatedly given new forms. The concept of
's 'rebirth' has always been the background color of my creation.
🐚
Simposca wrote a poem:
"The lifespan of the crown is longer than that of the head.
lost to the gloves by hand.
's right foot shoes defeated the right foot."
's lifespan may be much longer than that of humans, and
The stories they carry are far beyond our imagination.
When we re-appreciate the beauty of "bad",
is also giving them a long story,
adds our footnote.
Have you ever discovered unusual charm from neglected things
?
Does Song Xiaoke’s story inspire you?
Welcome to leave a message to share with us💡
Go and find Song Xiaoke to play:
Xiaohongshu: @Llorona
Interview Editor - Shunzi
Design - Maomao Seed
