The Musée de Bagnes‘ annual photography exhibition features the work of Anglo-Swiss artist and researcher Joan Ayrton. The exhibition is based on a travelling exhibition of 30 large-format prints, which runs along the 520-metre top of the Mauvoisin dam.
Joan Ayrton chose to photograph the dam with a Tessina, a tiny camera that appeared on the market at the end of the 1950s, when the Mauvoisin works were completed. It’s a historic confrontation between two engineering disciplines, both of which generate narratives.
Joan Ayrton’s project was built up empirically. The first shots were taken at an altitude of 2600 m, bathed in bright sunlight. They resonate with the discovery of a pendulum suspended to its full height, installed in the belly of the imposing dam to indicate the slightest dilation of the concrete.
For Joan Ayrton, Pendulum Shift evokes the moment when the great pendulum of time, oscillating slowly between one extreme and the other, between left and right, between crisis and lull, is thrown out of balance, projecting the world into another, far more disturbing dimension.

Joan Ayrton, an Anglo-Swiss artist and researcher living in Paris, approaches her work through the prism of the landscape, its historical constructions and contemporary upheavals. The mediums she uses – mainly painting, photography and film – are all part of a reflection on the image, how it appears, how it is made and how it is installed in a space. In recent years, her work has focused more specifically on mineral and geological issues, exploring the instabilities and upheavals of the contemporary physical and political world, as well as the evocations and metaphors of an abstract geology.

Pendulum Shift, Joan Ayrton © Musée de Bagnes, Foto : Olivier Lovey