Héloïse Delègue

Héloïse Delègue’s practice explores constructed textiles as paintings. Her visual language incorporates symbols, objects, fabrics and paint to question human interrelationships and hierarchies within genders. Using the view of an anthropologist, she uses memories, which she combines with myths and factual truths to comment on current societal, cultural and political narratives. By observing networks of people around her in displacement and transitions she looks at new forms of relationships in a context where belief systems and values seem to be disrupted, conflicted, and challenged by new forms of digital communications. How do all these parameters can modify their affect and transpose in the communal and private sphere? How do the documents and fictions that control, describe and guide these systems and spaces are being tested? Her most recent works particularly explore materiality and historicity of textiles, which she recuperates as debris but also collects from various places and people. Exploring the consumerist aspect of fabrics as junks and as classified objects, she creates assemblages as irregular patterns, which she then hides under other textiles and materials. The blank canvas becomes is layered successively with “painting textiles” which acts as filters. The deconstructed nomenclature of the various textures she uses opens conversations about categorization of humans, and skins. By puzzling abstracted pieces of numbered fabrics, Delègue isolates the fetish and the form to perhaps address a sense of vulnerability in the flesh itself. Adopting creative methods resembling exit strategies, she conveys a sense of secrecy and intimacy. The light-hearted sense of humour in her work creates tensions between release and holding back. By juggling between concealing, revealing, and creating odd juxtapositions of materials the artist addresses an awkward invitation to question sexuality and the current notion of femininity.