Approaching a work from artist Aurélia Jaubert feels more like a deliberate undertaking than a passive viewing experience: her textile collages stretch as many as 4 meters (13 feet) long, and are composed of countless tapestry fragments gleaned from disparate flea markets and secondhand stores. The result is a beautiful explosion of kitsch and complexity that compels the viewer to sit with the work, to take time to look a bit closer, and follow the stories that emerge.
Jaubert (1967) is a French artist whose work is based primarily in assemblage. Earlier in her career she worked in photography and mixed media, including the Mixtape and Super VHS series, made from obsolete audio and VHS tape, and Lost in Hardiskland, a photographic series drawn from computer glitches. But in 2017, she began collecting needlepoint canvases without quite knowing what she wanted to do with them — and has worked primarily in large-scale tapestry collage ever since.
Needlepoint has been a common domestic hobby since as early as the 15th century, but saw a resurgence in popularity in the 1960s and 70s, when pre-painted kits hit the market. As a result, a wide range of pop-culture representations made by amateurs and experts alike have ended up in the same bins at secondhand markets; from recreations of fine-art icons like Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper to Mickey Mouse illustrations. Making these incongruous elements cohabitate in her textile-based collages is part of the fun, Jaubert says, and compels the viewer to reflect on what we consider kitsch, or in poor taste, and why.
“As usual with collage, when there is a juxtaposition between two things that weren’t together before, a different meaning appears,” she said. “It is about mixing – as if there were no borders between eras, or between art styles, nor between capital-A art and folk art. It all forms one single world where everything coexists.”
Jaubert had some experience with textiles before diving into the large-scale tapestry works – her VHS pieces and other soft sculpture work included weaving and crocheting. She also describes dabbling in needlepoint as a child, starting projects during rainy vacations when she was bored, and sometimes never finishing them. She describes her exploration of new mediums as guided by little “accidents” – encounters with materials that inspire new ways of working.
Today, Jaubert’s creation process is intuitive: She does not plan the works in advance by creating designs on a computer or on paper, but rather lays out pieces on the floor and allows a new world to form. From the start, when first laying her scavenged tapestry collection out in her studio, she decided these works must be large in scale to achieve the desired effect.
“It became fairly obvious to me that if I wanted to make something interesting, it had to become something big, something closer to the scale of medieval tapestries,” she said. “The idea was to create a kind of landscape, something you could wander through visually and tell yourself a story.”
In the decade since she began this work, the art world’s view of textiles has evolved, Jaubert acknowledges. She attributes the recent popularity of craftwork in the art world to a number of factors: cyclical trends, much-needed evolution in views surrounding gender in art, and a return to labor-intensive work in response to the rise of AI.
“Craft work is a way of pushing back against AI — of asking, ‘what can’t a machine do?’” she said. “Sure, a machine can do embroidery, but really building a composition with your hands, with your head – there is a lot of textile work that could never be done by artificial intelligence.”
Case in point: While Jaubert does use a machine to sew her work, that doesn’t make it any less labor intensive. Her first tapestries, while she was still refining a workflow and technique, took her seven or eight months to compile. Such labor was previously overlooked and undervalued, because it was primarily carried out by women.
“For decades, needlework was something feminine, and a way of keeping women at home,” she said. “For me, this work is really a way of retroactively freeing all these women: they leave the home and end up in public spaces; their work becomes visible. It comes out of the confinement of the home, it lives on its own, autonomously, and put end to end, it forms a kind of long chain of women holding hands.”
By making this collective labor visible, Jaubert reveals – and celebrates – something uniquely human.
“The identity of the artist, of the human, is perhaps gaining more value, and so the boundaries between art and craft are fading, precisely because that’s what artificial intelligence won’t be able to do. What matters is the gesture, the human gesture.”
Jaubert’s work can be seen in two upcoming shows in France: “Énergie artistique,” a group show running September 19 through November 1 at Galerie Près des pommes in Criel-sur-mer, and “Kaléidoscope de talents,” an art and design showcase held October 18–25 during Art Basel Paris.
English 