Laurence Payot portrait

Lou Chapelle (aka Laurence Payot)

I am a cross disciplinary artist, weaving socially engaged and participatory approaches with digital and new technologies.

I work collaboratively with people to create video content that reflects multiple voices and perspectives. I am passionate about how we connect to nature, about the power of collectivity and ‘togetherness’. I want my work to send messages of social and environmental justice.

By becoming part of my work, people are given tools to connect with one another and experience the everyday from a collective perspective. The exchange between the materials and the people that form the artworks is the key ingredient for the creative alchemy to happen. Individual feelings and stories become interwoven into sound, video, or visual pieces, often coming together in multilayered forms.

My recent works explore new ways to use the medium of video as “light”, giving the pixels a more tactile/ tangible/ physical presence in space. I use holographic reflections and projections to create immersive and intimate experiences for the viewers.

Past works range from large scale multilayered holographic projections on gauze (examples of such works include Angels, The Bleach Packers, Growing Antlers) – to more intimate one-one experiences using motion tracking, inviting the viewer to ‘touch’ holograms and directly manipulate video content (e.g Living Sculpture, Coral). My video content isn’t contrived by the square edges of traditional screens but floats within an invisible black backdrop. The aesthetic resembles renaissance painting where objects and people seem doted of a spiritual/ other worldly light.

I was born in Metz (France), graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in 2005, and have since been based at The Royal Standard studios in Liverpool (UK), where I was a director in 2007/08, and currently a trustee.

I have shown my work nationally and internationally with renowned organisations, including the Pompidou Centre-Metz (France), Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial, Bluecoat, National Trust (UK) and the Belluard Bollwerk International (Switzerland). I was shortlisted for the Liverpool Art Prize in 2013 and awarded the prestigious SkyArts Ignition: Futures Fund 2012, a one-year bursary and documentary by the TV channel SkyArts. I have received multiple Arts Council Grants and Awards including a “developing your creative practice” grant in 2021 to explore the medium of video as light.

  • Lou walks, talks, observes and absorbs. There is magic in how she explores and in what she makes.

    — Scott Farlow, artist and art consultant.

  • Lou Chapelle shifts our perceptions of what is real and what is not… her artwork plays on the imagined or illusionary and questions our recognition of the world around us.

    — Laura Robertson, Writer and Director of The Double Negative

  • For Lou, the public realm is the perfect stage to surprise and inspire people, to make you snap out of your daily routine and look up to see the world fresh.

    — Eva De Groote, Curator and Core Member Artistic Researcher at Timelab, Ghent, Belgium

  • Lou displaces the idea of the artists performing using their own body by asking other people to undertake these transformations to themselves.

    — Claire Doherty, Curator, Writer and Director of Situations