Artist

Annabelle Jouot

Birthplace

Montreuil Sous Bois

Living in

Paris

Education

Studio Berçot

Medium

Textile

Tools

Weaving looms, raw country fibres and wools, needles, a wooden weaving comb and her inspirational wall made of constantly changing fetish images.

The material guides me most of the time, it's a back and forth between myself and it

Before "painting with wool", Annabelle Jouot spent twenty years weaving words between magazine columns. A former fashion editor, the artist finds in textile art a different relationship to time, an extreme slowness that contrasts with the fast and twirling seasonal rhythms of her first professional life. In her studio with its immaculate walls, amidst fibres and raw wools, needles and looms of all sizes, books devoted to the textile artist Sheila Hicks, the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass or the plastic artist Théo Mercier - whose first monograph bears the evocative title La possession du monde n'est pas ma priorité - suggest sources of inspiration drawn from the air of time, art and contemporary issues. Bathed in music - the Hunky Dory series is a humorous take on the title of one of David Bowie's masterpieces - with a wool comb always hanging around her neck, Annabelle Jouot sees her tapestries as abstract paintings and the process of making them as a meditative gesture to be renewed at every moment. In silence or to the sounds (among others) of Gershwin, Philip Glass, Caetano Veloso, Julien Ribot or Brian Eno, once she has the colours and the composition in mind, she lets herself be guided by a raw and primitive material that imprints the traces of the human hand, imposes its own rhythm, obliges her to adapt and to constantly invent new technical solutions. "The production phases are never the same and this is something that drives me in my work. The traps set by the material are games that sharpen the path of each work," she adds. Each of her unique pieces invites us to contemplate the beauty of imperfections.

Text Sonia Pavlik