FANNY VIOLLET – FOUND HANDKERCHIEF’S DIARY (1990-2018)
21.02.2018 - 30.03.2018
Opening on March 8, from 6 pm onwards
Fanny Viollet is a Parisian originally from Angoulême who left her career as a mathematics teacher to turn to art. As a child, she hated needlework and sewing projects; as an adult, she decided to subvert their original purpose using a needle and sewing machine, with the idea of embroidering objects that had already lived a life of their own—a tea towel, a shirt, a handkerchief found in the street. She herself coined the term piquetures to describe her creations.
Found Handkerchiefs most likely originated with Four Latches to Lift, a poem by René Char that he entrusted to her in 1982. Never published, it was embroidered using free-motion stitching in a limited edition of twelve pocket handkerchiefs. From 1990 onwards, handkerchiefs lost or abandoned by their owners began to find a new home in Fanny Viollet’s studio.
Picked up from a gutter, found at the bottom of the pocket of a coat tried on in a second-hand shop, or brought back from travels in Belgium, Japan, India, Italy and elsewhere, these handkerchiefs—dirty or torn—are only ready to become the artist’s square canvas after a good soak and careful ironing. Having first encased them in clear vinyl, Fanny Viollet machine-embroiders each one with an inscription conceived that very day, recording the date, place and circumstances of its discovery. Sometimes blending into the handkerchief’s printed patterns, sometimes immediately catching the viewer’s eye, the embroidered text places Found Handkerchiefs somewhere between a diary, a postcard and a page from a book. The artist’s identity occasionally mingles, through her initials, with traces of that of the handkerchief’s former owner.
By taking these squares of fabric, otherwise destined to disappear, into her care, she sets in motion a kind of reversal of their fate: they had to be lost for her to find them, and to get dirty for her to wash them. Together, all these handkerchiefs embroider a life, woven through the gaps and shaped by chance.
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