In her dream, her stomach turns into a ceramic flower stem. The growing plant’s pieces are falling apart. Lying in her bed, she tries to stitch the fragments of her belly back together, like she does in the studio while building her giant flowers. It happens often in her dreams that she’s overwhelmed by her work, by the mountain of work ahead. Her sheets turn into a fabric that envelops her, swallowing her.
In the smallest room of this mansion, Elisabeth Perrault gathers and lays down her torments. Opaque, solid, yet fragile and breakable. Digesting her fear of being swallowed by her own work, she turns it into a broken daisy. She swallows her anxiety about running out of time by taking her time, by inhabiting the complimentary strengths and weaknesses of her materials. Some things break when they’re dropped or crushed. Others when you tear them.
Elisabeth’s fears moved from her stomach to her hands to my edges. Digested. My twisted spine wraps its way up the wall of this tiny room, too small to contain my inse- curities. It climbs above my head, invasively. I fall to the ground, and I find myself. I recoil, spin, grapple, and rise to the surface, only to find myself face-to-face with the window, gasping. My worries overflow, unfurl, they bloom. They’re beautiful.
When I’m broken, when everything’s going wrong, slipping away, I fix my clothes. Most of the time, the holes are in the pockets of my coats. I mend the holes and I’m back on top. The things I want to keep safe won’t escape me anymore. It’s the stitching that allows me to hold onto the things that wanted to slip away. Sewing steadies everything.
–Text by Jézabel Plamondon
Elisabeth Perrault expresses herself through sculptural textile installations that intertwine human forms, everyday objects, and organic materials, creating surreal allegories. Her creative process relies on material techniques often associated with craft. Perrault establishes a maternal and intimate connection with textiles—a material traditionally asso- ciated with women and the domestic sphere—that celebrates femininity.
