Softness and resilience. Presence and absence. Vitality and stillness. These are just a few of the dualities that permeate the atmospheric work of Jeanne Vicerial, whose textile-focused practice taps into history and femininity with precision and reverence.
A city-wide exhibition of Vicerial’s pieces titled Incarnation: Carte blanche Jeanne Vicerial opens across several historic spaces in Aix-en-Provence this month: Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme, Musée des Tapisseries, Chapelle de la Visitation, and Musée Granet. Situated amid centuries-old architecture and existing museum collections, the artist’s works nod to time, tradition, and remembrance. The show surveys sculptures and installations created throughout the last several years, including sprawling installations that feature yards of pooling rope and smaller, intimate, provocative wall pieces.
Known for her dramatic Armors series, Vicerial nods to medieval European heritage, such as knights’ armor and burial and memorial customs. “Gisante de cœur,” for example, which translates to “recumbent figure of the heart,” references the tradition of nobility or priests’ sculptural likenesses placed atop sarcophagi. Except in Vicerial’s world, these figures are all enigmatically, anonymously, and powerfully female. The silhouettes of bodies are conveyed through textile, which in turn is associated with clothing and its potential to both reveal and conceal as well as protect.
“Beyond practical functions, textiles carry within them a memory: the memory of gestures, of uses, and of the traces left behind by the bodies that have worn or transformed them,” says a statement. “Thus, the material becomes a silent witness to past presences—the medium for a history that is simultaneously individual, intimate, and collective.”
Incarnation opens on June 13 and continues through October 4.
