Upcoming:
The Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius, with the Métamorphoses Association, Bretteville-sur-Odon, 2027.
Abysses, group exhibition with the Dire Autrement collective, La Bouée, Cherbourg, 2027.
Léna h. Coms
Léna h. Coms is a multidisciplinary Neo-Symbolist artist. Her paintings resemble frozen theatre scenes, brought into motion through a serial process: an accumulation of still frames that seem on the verge of coming to life. Each series extends into texts, sculpture, textiles, and sometimes video, creating a body of work that explores our relationship to society, the individual, otherness, and the mythical narratives that shape our collective imagination.
Her artistic practice originates in inner visions, nourished by literature, philosophy, and art history. It revolves around mythical figures and narratives drawn from Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and pagan traditions, approached as living archetypes capable of illuminating contemporary human experience.
Beginning with sketches, the artist enters into a dialogue with friends and collaborators who agree to engage physically or vocally in the creative process. These encounters give rise to embodied, site-specific propositions that unfold across multiple media: painting, drawing, installation, performance, sound, ceramics, textiles, and writing. This collaborative and transdisciplinary approach allows deeply intimate works to emerge alongside collective forms of expression.
The resulting exhibitions are conceived as complex constellations in which artworks converse with one another, questioning the place of the sacred within everyday life, the body within society, and our capacity to receive and transform the emotions that inhabit us. Several recurring figures structure this research: Eve, explored through self-portraiture, becomes a field for investigating guilt; Pomona embodies the possibility of emancipation; Penelope traverses themes of grief and absence; while JC+MM, a deliberately sacrilegious dual figure, examines the body and the couple beyond conventional gender norms.
Through this practice, Léna h. Coms offers a sensitive and embodied reinterpretation of myth as a means of understanding and transforming the present.
Contact: lenah.coms@gmail.com
What if Odysseus were here? What if she were mad?
Alone with a giant ball of thread, Penelope moves through the many states of waiting: hope, desire, joy, anger, fear, and doubt. She weaves, unravels, undoes and begins again, while a presence seems gradually to take shape around her.
But has Odysseus really returned, or is Penelope inventing him in order to survive his absence?
A dance and textile performance about waiting, memory, and the blurred boundary between reality and imagination.
PENELOPE, WEAVING DESTINY
Dance and textile performance
Sunday, September 20, 2026 — 3:00 p.m.
Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer beach
Duration: 52 min
All ages — Free admission
As part of the Journées du Matrimoine
With the support of HF+ Normandie
Presented by the Naos association
Annie Lenoir and Léna h. Coms come together around a figure who has crossed the centuries: Penelope.
The one who waits. The one who weaves and unravels. The one whose time seems suspended.
But what happens when waiting becomes creation? When thread becomes a trace, when time inscribes itself into matter, and when absence becomes a presence?
Through paintings, drawings and installations, the two artists engage in a sensitive and singular dialogue around this mythological figure, exploring repeated gestures, metamorphosis, desire, absence and the passage of time.
Attends, Pénélope invites you to enter a space where it is no longer quite clear who is waiting for whom, nor what is being woven.
An exhibition to discover, to experience, and perhaps to unravel in turn.
Exhibition supported by the Métamorphoses association
September 25–27, 2026, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
Espace Michel Frérot
3 rue du Val Amphrye, Thaon, France
