PAPER
Métiers d’art
Commissioned articel for SWAG, 2023
The term Métiers d’art is widely understood in its context of high fashion, as the moment that celebrates the makers and artisans. Famed by the house of Chanel who inaugurated the special fashion show in 2002. Twenty years later, Chanel’s Métiers d’art was presented in Dakar. A “deep respectful dialoguing” as Virgine Viard, Creative Director of Chanel, describes the multiple day event in Senegal's capital, is indeed what we need when it comes to recognising the creative impetus that carries the fashion and art industry alike. Looking at the following artists, which consciously bridge their artistic practice with fashion, design and the communicative power of material as Johanna Bramble or Bubu Ogisi do, using practices and methodologies of tapestry and collage and the female legacy of fabric making as Billie Zangewa and Anya Paintsil do or using the mechanism of the thread and stitch to accentuate their art and thereby creating a sensory narrative as Joana Coumalie applies it to her photographs.
Looking closer at their work also acknowledges the vast legacy of artists of these fields, notably Faith Ringgold, born 1930 in Harlem, USA, who was influenced by feminism and civil rights. These still prevailing issues were prominently depicted in Echoes of Harlem (1980), a quilt work she made in collaboration with her mother, a popular fashion designer of the time. Karen Hampton in a similar fashion, concerned with the historical and contemporary effects of slavery, told through the female lens of her ancestors, honours collaborative femininity. The US American textile artist is known for her diverse techniques of quilting and fabric making, drawn from her own family history and depicted in works such as Who Shall Remember (2019) and Washer Woman (2019). The list is long and growing. The following is in no way conclusive, but a gentle attempt to highlight a selection of five métiers d’art.
Material Language
Respectful dialoguing is also the basis of French artist and designer Johanna Bramble who lives and works between Dakar and Abidjan. In 2008 she moved to Senegal and opened a weaving workshop that uses a loom, requiring two people to work together in mutual rhythm and understanding of the technique and creation of patterns inscribed through the movement between makers and loom. Bramble uses textiles as a bearer of spatial language and meaning making that can be found universally in different cultures and times. As the artist explains: "I chose the textile medium or should I rather say that the textile medium chose me. Like the word to the text, the thread is a conductor of identity. Attached to civilizations and universal language by excellence, simultaneously a maker of meaning and objects of essence, weaving becomes for me an algorithm where I shape the material, destructure it, reshape it, to finally make it the precious source that allows me to reinvent myself. My weavings claim a revisited animism and illustrate my sincere empathy with an Essential Nature. Witnesses of the evolution of civilizations, textiles give us to see unsuspected links between cultures and free us from frontiers” (2023) Her current performative installation Magnétude (2022) in collaboration with Fatim Soumaré is an extension of both artists philosophy and work with traditional weaving techniques at La Galerie 19M in Dakar, a satellite exhibition project of Chanel’s interdisciplinary space in Paris.
Fabric of Knowledges
Fibre artist and creative director Bubu Ogisi uses fabric as a site of knowledge and research, designing pieces with communicative layers. Her nomadic upbringing between London and Lagos, her studies in Paris, the consequential physical and referential distance to the continent has made the urgency of being present; learning, listening and capturing the vast material culture in situ apparent to her. Now situated between Lagos, Accra and Nairobi with her fashion label IAMISIGO, established in 2009, she applies an extended understanding of clothing as a membrane that she inscribes with the stories she encounters. With her designs and effort to preserve the often ancient artisanal practices, she bridges wearable culture as consumer goods and a deep understanding of the knowledge of fabrics of all kinds - decolonising material culture. Using design as a conduit, she unpacks the complexity of identity, community and spirituality. “By exaggerating texture, structure and space I am able to break and transform the rules and expectations of what textiles are into a transient humanity. My work primarily focuses on how fashion and textile can not only keep history alive but also pass on information for the future through preservation of techniques and expression through matter, through the ultimate canvas - the human body via clothing as a vehicle of communication. I convey lost historical stories, transforming found ‘data’ and applying it to garments and fibres as a form of silent protest to post and neo-colonialism, portrayed through textile art, space installations, visuals and film” (2023) the artist explains. Her works are currently on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as part of the “Africa Fashion'' exhibit until April this year.
The Self and the Stitch
“The ultimate act of resistance is self-love” (Tate Gallery, 2020) says the Malawian-South African artist Billie Zangewa and evokes the recollection of how her artistic practice was birthed. Growing up, the act of sewing created a space for women to come together in sharing, listening, and healing collectively. Zangewa’s works are made from silk offcuts and collaged by hand. The stitched fragments speak of ownership over one's own story that is incomplete, yet constantly becoming, changing and reforming. The stitch itself that holds the rough edges of the silk pieces together carry pain, memory and resilience that is reflected in the domestic, often intimate portraits presented in her work. The silk looks deliciously soft, yet it deprives us off any ownership - silk is a feeling, a desire. The way Zangewa pairs this auspicious material with mundane scenes of a family gathering, a woman lying awake in bed immersed in her own thoughts or sitting so content on the couch, reading a book makes the work all the more a profound statement between matter and material. Maybe due to the softness of her material but also the strong female gaze, Zangewa’s storytelling is gentle, yet it speaks of the intricate moments of being a woman in a hostile world, the love of a mother and the importance of loving the Self, however imperfect. A Quiet Fire, her first major exhibition of works in the UK is currently on show at Brighton CCA.
Speculative Materiality
Anya Paintsil’s art making has its material beginnings in traditional heritage - created out of mythologies from both her Welsh and Ghanaian origins and produced with old-fashioned rug hooking and embroidery techniques, her figurative tapestries render into speculative forms of identity, belonging and representation. Multilayered and forceful concepts in which the embedded figures are often draped in ease, sometimes with a farcical allure that reflects on the phantastical on which these tales and myths are built on. The tactility of her work, the embeddedness of her characters lying immersed in thick woollen carpets shows a moment of being grounded and connected with oneself while envisioning diverse worlds and personalities in an exercise of world-making. Recurring elements in Paintsil’s works are weaves, braids and other hair pieces including her own, showing a contemporary understanding of black hair, holding victory over her own representation, shown in her recently closed exhibition Proof of Their Victories at Hannah Traore Gallery in New York. “Hair holds so much cultural significance throughout the diaspora; hair has been used to show whether you’re rich or poor, single or married – your status, your identity. (...) My work is informed by materials, and the concept of my work can’t be detached from the materials. The medium and the message are quite literally braided together.” (Hanna Traore Gallery 2023) Paintsil’s poignant practice, playful and assertive, speaks of a conscious engagement with her own identity and an unapologetic placement within the world.
Thread of Resilience
Joana Choumali’s artistic practice started in documentary photography and developed over time into an extended meaning of the photographic medium as a conceptual way to re-engage with the captured reality. The fleeting dawn builds the backdrop of her images, a transitional moment between the dreamworld and the reality that collapses our linear understanding of time. Coumali’s shift from observer and chronicler of her surroundings to an active engagement with the image and its narrative took place after the devastating terror attack in Grand Bassam in 2016 a place that Choumali used to connect with endearing childhood memories. “Each stitch was a way to recover, to lie down the emotions, the loneliness, and mixed feelings I felt. As an automatic scripture, the act of adding colourful stitches on the pictures has had a soothing effect on me, like a meditation. Adding embroidery on these street photographs was an act of channelling hope and resilience.” (Prix Prictet, 2019) Creating immersive and dreamlike layers that the Ivorian artist stitches into the image is a cathartic beauty. The stitches of colourful thread is a way of highlighting and guiding the gaze towards a fleeting moment that seems to almost come back into motion. Through this dynamic interference, the images seem to perform a memento mori, not as a reminder of death but an affirmation of life.
These artists oscillate between the materiality of personhood and a multiplicity of cultural heritage which is rendered into each of their unique practices. By using their canvases to speculate, to transform bodies and ideas into magical moments and possibilities they join the ranks of ancestral storytellers -, women that have been carefully collecting and sharing their knowledges with their sisters and daughters. The female gaze, the subtle, delicate ways of their art is capable of showing the politically conscious body, intertwined in an understanding of social cohesion while demanding space, stating their presence as artists,which permeates their artworks through and through.
Ultimately, métiers d’art is an intent, honouring the process and labour that transcends the mere production of an object. It is the recognition of the corporality between maker and material, inscribed with the intricate observation turned into a haptic language. Whether through the spectacle fueled by fashion houses or the art world, celebrating the métiers d’art requires a moment of close looking and openness to understand the depths of making.