SYLVIE FRANQUET

I’m a collage artist in everything I do. I use finished tapestries and rework them with lurex and Persian carpet wool. I love wool, silk thread, driftwood, rocks, found objects, they are sensual and their feel or shape suggest method and ideas to me. I love colour! I need colour. The laborious process of unpicking, repairing and reworking can take months, but the slowness and the handwork is my ’zen’, my sanity, and also my rebellion against the hurried times we live in. The result is a metamorphosis, a transformation achieved by the magic power of the needle.

“My specific artistic voice, originates in a life of travel, and it layers word and image, ancient myth and everyday life, in textile, tapestries, collage, embroidered cloth dolls and driftwood sculpture. I rework found tapestries, showing a preference for those based on canonical works of art, rework them with further images and with found words from poets and thinkers, and text messages from friends.”

Needlepoint has for centuries been seen as the domain of women. I am fascinated by this inheritance: the needlepoints I find are often based on paintings by men, considered masterpieces of art, and when these are copied and sewn by women, accepting and reinforcing a male gaze of the world, it is called craft, kitsch, and something women do. I use a rhizomatic layering of texts and languages that, in the process, take on the nature of rebellious graffiti and radical twitter feeds, a contemporary sampler.

Sometimes I feel like my head is an archaeological site, where I can dig in the various layers of history. On my travels in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Iran I’m fascinated by the history, the classical world and mythology, and by the patterns and different language of Islamic art. But then in London I try and see many art shows because I’m interested in how artists work things out in their head. I’m also quite obsessed with prehistory, and the beginnings of the human story, art and language, and I love words and reading. Some words are like talismans to me, they protect and reveal things to me, so I sew them on my tapestries for others to read them, or feel them somehow through the colour and patterns.

I make a lot of my work either on my dining table or on the move. I think my work has a domestic quality because most of what I do is sewing, and I love my work to be part of the home. I see my tapestries as banners in a fixed place in the home where everyone gathers, for remembering mythology, poetry and philosophy, urging towards a freeing and flexibility of thinking, and towards an urgent reconnecting with the natural word. It’s complicated and very simple at the same time.

Sylvie Franquet was born in Belgium in 1961, she read Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ghent and Cairo universities. Much of her life has been spent travelling in the Mediterranean and Middle East, reading and writing on culture. Her first tapestries were shown at the acclaimed 2014 exhibition, More Material, curated by Duro Olowu at Salon 94 in New York. In 2017, she had a major solo show reMembering at October Gallery in London, followed in 2018, by a large solo exhibition reCollecting, at The Harley Gallery, Nottinghamshire. In 2019 she had a solo show at Sometime Studio in Paris.