Artist Tiffany Black has spent 25 years collecting fragile wooden market crates — cageots — from markets across the Aveyron, Tarn and Tarn-et-Garonne. More than 1,000 of them now form the centrepiece of her new exhibition, There Is No Map: a 5.5-metre sculptural boat, balanced on a single metal upright, that conjures the flat-bottomed market boats she saw in Turkey and Venice, piled high with fruit.

The show fills three rooms at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMC) in Cordes-sur-Ciel, a hilltop town in the Tarn, and mixes sculpture with sound, film, prints and pastel and charcoal drawings. Its themes — travel, displacement, memory and the elusive idea of home — draw on a life split between France and England since Black first arrived as a child in the 1970s with her artist family.

There's a family thread running through it all. Her mother, painter Jacqueline Black, started collecting the crates to make small decorated shelf sets; when she died, Tiffany inherited a couple of bags of the delicate pieces and kept collecting. She has also kept her mother's discarded oil palettes, using their traces to create images of the same southern French landscape seen through two generations of colour. Jacqueline's own link to the area runs deep: she was commissioned in 1989 to make a work for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, now in the MAMC's permanent collection.

Black has worked as a teenager in Cordes-sur-Ciel and keeps a studio in nearby Laguépie, at the meeting of the Aveyron and Viaur rivers. The exhibition is the last in a series of four marking the MAMC's 20th anniversary, and its setting adds to the appeal — the Maison du Grand Fauconnier, a 12th-century stone building on the town's Grand Rue Raymond VII, giving a contemporary installation a medieval frame.

There Is No Map runs from 18 September to 1 November 2026, open afternoons 2pm–6pm, Monday and Wednesday to Sunday (closed Tuesdays).

Why it matters for travellers: it's a good excuse to plan a day in Cordes-sur-Ciel, one of the prettiest bastide towns in southwest France, and pair contemporary art with market-town wandering — fitting, given the show's raw material. Visit in the morning for the markets, then duck into the cool stone rooms in the afternoon. It also works neatly with a trip to Albi, home to the striking Sainte-Cécile cathedral and the Toulouse-Lautrec museum, barely half an hour away.