To speak past the phrase, past “the disastrously express medium of language,” per James Baldwin: That is Marie Hazard’s obsession.
Hazard is a weaver, and we converse properly. But phrases are arduous for her. She is dyslexic. She needs she may write. Writing, she says, is “troublesome to subsequent to inconceivable” for her. However recall: “textual content” got here into French from the Medieval Latin texere, which means “to weave.” In earlier Latin, textus meant “a woven factor.”
Hazard was born in Le Havre, a metropolis for which she bears little nostalgia. “I had a sophisticated childhood and questioned myself lots,” she tells me in her Parisian studio. “My biggest want was to amass my freedom, my independence.” And so, she developed her voice in a collection of elsewheres: London (the place she discovered to weave at Central Saint Martins), then São Paulo, New York, and Mexico Metropolis. She learn lots: “an inexhaustible supply.” We speak a lot of Marguerite Duras and of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, which took a central position in her breakthrough exhibition, in 2021, at Galerie Mitterrand in Paris.
Marie Hazard: My Fingers, My Faces, 2024.
Courtesy the artist
That is how Hazard works: first, she attracts. She leans towards spirals, jagged types, and splashes of coloration which can be half Mark Rothko, half Jacques Demy. Then she weaves from this drawn plan. She listens to music or maybe a podcast whereas working on the loom. “It’s all about listening. How my physique strikes. I inform tales. I feel weaving is my very own language, an motion to transcribe my ideas, my tales, my messages.” Her colours are spring-fresh, however can lean broody, play-around. Typically, she prints pictures—Brazilian road scenes, a Lakers jersey, selfies—upon her woven texts. Maybe it’s a option to stretch time, to delay the oblivion of forgetting.
In early cinema, the method of modifying one shot subsequent to a different to create the third which means was dubbed not montage, however dialog. And Hazard, who was touched early by weavers like Sheila Hicks however is presently extra animated by books and music and flicks, all the time makes use of her items to converse. She tells me a few particular motif in her work: the spiral. Paris, which I get the sense has by no means fairly felt like dwelling for her, is constructed across the idea of the spiral. As she places it in an interview in her debut monograph, put out by Zolo Press in 2022: “I started working with spirals as a result of I used to be feeling like one. I used to be actually asking myself: The place ought to I place myself? … I really feel a lot better not being within the heart. The sting provides me a sure readability.” The entire level, as I take it, is for the artist to get misplaced in her personal work. The self will get effaced and re-created in so many cross hatches, small threads, and hypnotic patterns.
Hazard just isn’t unaware of the sudden institutional curiosity within the apply of weaving, traditionally dismissed. The Met simply staged a complete exhibition placing Twentieth-century weavers (Anni Albers, Lenore Tawney, Olga de Amaral) along with historical Andean artists spanning the primary millennium BCE to the sixteenth century. Tate and MoMA PS1 have mounted retrospectives of Albers and the fourth-generation Navajo weaver Melissa Cody, respectively. As Hazard slyly notes, “weaving is taking off.” It’s a loud second. Each in its creation and its reception, the craft conjures up introspection, in an age the place that’s briefly provide. There’s a hushed drive to her works. You don’t consciously really feel them engaged on you while you first encounter them, however afterward, on the subway or within the park, there they’re, unfolding in entrance of you. Like {a photograph} you possibly can maintain.