Sébastien Gouju manipulates our visual environment and the nature-inspired signs present in popular culture. In particular he playfully tackles the use and decorative representations of nature in the domestic environment: minerals, fauna and flora are regularly summoned in the staging of their distance from being mere decor. The artist theatricalises to the point of absurdity the domesticity and servitude of living things, with the corollary will to invalidate socio-cultural hierarchies. From the mountebank to the caged animal, via ornamental aestheticisation, he humorously underlines the all-too-human habit of building decorative menageries on a household scale. From these observations on our habitat and its decorum, in which animality and environment would accommodate themselves to man's pleasure, Gouju seeks to abolish by amplification the borders that have become criminal between culture and nature. Mixing the softness of bourgeois comfort with the sinister figure of the minstrel and rustic animality, he makes works that are increasingly wild with regard to modernist utopias. A sculptor, he diverts everyday objects considered kitsch, such as wine jugs, potted palms or lucky swallows, and uses craft techniques such as glazed earthenware, embroidery, lace, metalwork and leatherwork to create incongruous hybridisations and collisions of meaning and form. These signs, transformed into images, propose light or formidable narratives that mix the everyday with fable, with an amused and subversive eye.