Words transform into art in Manon’s works!
by admin
As a part of Digital Weaving Norway’s What’s on Your Loom series, here’s featuring the latest woven artwork by Belgium-based visual artist Manon Clement. Clement often works with an industrial jacquard, but she was recently at the TexLab in Liège, where she experimented with the TC2 loom! She feels that the TC2 enables her to focus even more on the technique part of weaving. She manually creates a connection in her work, which is a very important part of her vision.
In Manon’s works, poetic words are always searching for a tangibility, and for a place where they create meaning. Language seems to transform into art like an ornament. By adding words to a material, she involves her viewers and creates a dialogue in the conceptual meaning of her work.
Words attach themselves to textiles and become interwoven in the context and connotations that textiles have to offer. A few years ago, Clement lost her father, who also seems to find a place in her works and words. Words try to take in different meanings that reach beyond this personal matter. Textiles provide a tactile and meaningful space for words so they don’t get lost, to give her father a tangibility.
The words on the work “I try to imagine how your texture felt like.” plays with the meaning and literalness of the work. At the same time, the words yearn for a memory of a texture, a touch, but along the other side, the textile creates a texture in itself due to the used techniques and yarns. The text is readable from both sides, furthermore the text from the back is always slightly visible on the front, this is done deliberately to create a relief in the fabric. The work consists of only two colors, but one color is a combination of three yarns from a different material, such as mohair, cotton and lurex.
‘Do you exist in my mind’ is a slightly less technical work. Here also two colors are used with a combination of different yarns. The image that seems to be behind the words raises questions about existence, as we are always looking for a recognizability in the image that we seem to find impossible.
About…
Manon studied Textile Design at Luca School of Arts in Ghent and obtained her Master’s degree.
Links…
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