“I’d like cloth to be recognized as a material as noble as wood, stone or metal”, says French artist Simone Pheulpin, referring to traditional sculpture. Her material is quite simple, bands of raw cotton fabric, manufactured in the Vosges. This cloth is totally transformed by a piling of very dense and regular folds held together by invisible metal pins, and nothing else. Having recognized it as a space entirely her own, she has, from sculpture to sculpture, invented a grammar of sorts, and lent to the fold as she shapes it a function that is not only visual but chromatic. The result is a very strange work that looks like colonies of coral or lichen, or else recall slabs of striated limestone, vast surfaces whose smoothness is shot with fault lines.

Simone Pheulpin’s works can be found in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and in the Musée des arts décoratifs de Paris.

Text in English and French.