Memory of Jute

I have long worked with burlap. This material accompanies me because it carries a history: that of the sacks that once held the harvest, the wheat, the labour of men and seasons. I love its roughness, its scars, its warm colour that evokes earth and time. For me, this matter is almost alive. In this work, I allowed the canvas to express itself with its raw texture. The fibres, folds and irregularities become a landscape of matter. I intervene through gesture — sometimes through painting, sometimes through sewing or assemblage — to bring forth forms that suggest presences, silhouettes or traces of memory. Burlap is never neutral: it has already lived before arriving in the studio. I love to enter into dialogue with this past and give it a new voice. In this work, the material tells as much as the drawing or the colour. It is a way of paying tribute to simple gestures, to the rural world and to the human stories these fabrics have traversed.