French artist Aurélia Jaubert constructs epic tapestries by sewing together hand embroidered and woven tapestries. Characters range from classical figures from art history to icons from popular culture. “I build, in a way, a new landscape where all styles and all generations cohabit, without limits of time, kind or space, and where everything merges to become one.”

Firstly where did you grow up and where do you live now?

I grew up and lived in Paris, but I have been living in Joucas, in the south of France for the last three years (where I spent my holidays for 25 years). I’m lucky to have a large studio there.

What is your background in textile art?

I’m self-taught, I started taking pictures just after the baccalaureate. I went abroad and did several photojournalistic reportages, a lot of personal research and reports on art and artists for television. I then began to experiment with painting and sculpture while remaining faithful to the photographic image. I have always been fascinated by the metamorphosis of images, their passage from one medium to another, the illusions they generate. I gradually left the traditional medium of painting for heterogeneous compositions. I privilege the mixture, the detour: painting, textile, photography, digital image, collage, sewing, sculpture, all this “material” finds in my work an original legitimacy to be borrowed and edited… To ennoble the left-over, to be interested in the slightest manifestations of nature (reflections, bubbles, shadows, traces…) and to reinsert them in a cycle of metamorphosis that erases the value of use and restores an unexpected aesthetic value, these are, I think, as much the gestures of a collector as those of an artist faithful to the image. I dream about the fantastic destiny of small accidents or objects of everyday life, burrs, stains, drops, colored debris, decommissioned magnetic tapes, computer accidents, old swimming pool buoys, fabric samples, tapestries and canvases …  So many modern ruins from which I try to reinvent surprising or strange new images.

I don’t have a “background” in textile art. I made three other works in connection with textiles, works that I exhibited in my solo show at the Musée de la Manufacture in Roubaix in 2021:

Rebuts: it’s a kind of cell, an installation, made up of all my works waste. Drawings, photos, invitation cards… are sewn into large 7 cm strips assembled on suspended structures, and constitute a penetrable space.

Mixtape and SUPER VHS:  Those works are made with audio tapes, and VHS tapes to create semi-soft sculptures.

 I didn’t like the idea of throwing away these cassettes when they contained a completely malleable and usable material. I started trying to knit and crochet the tapes contained in these audio and VHS cassettes. That’s how the SUPER VHS and Mixtape series came about. I didn’t have knitting needles on hand so my first attempts were with wooden chopsticks from a Chinese restaurant. The tapes found a new life with this project: the magnetic tape, out of the box, was freed in a kind of autonomy and was transformed into a maze of sculptures with organic forms.

In Mixtape, the installations bear the names of all these artists or albums that constitute them and form then like a big mix in several dimensions, a mix of volumes in both senses of the word. But each sculpture exists independently and is made of one or more musical albums.

In SUPERVHS, it’s like if the movies escape their classical function and metamorphose into other forms. Each film here will become truly “independent” and each resulting sculpture bears the name of this film.

Why do you use textile techniques in your work / what draws you to using textiles?

You have to see my use of materials or objects more as an encounter. Some textiles are therefore part of this meeting.

For my tapestries, I have always found embroidered canvases very kitschy and often ugly, even old-fashioned (although as a child, during the summer vacations, I did some of them: flowers, roses), but I remained attached to this form of reproduction mixing popular imagery and art history through reproductions of classical paintings sometimes approximate. I had in mind to do something big, grandiose, but still funny, because humor and derision are also part of my vocabulary, and with a size comparable to the old tapestries. But I went at it little by little, each part calling for another one, like a kind of puzzle or a rebus, like a story that was told step by step.

How do you describe your art?

This work with needle point and old weaving, this sort of “tapestry” is constituted of an impressive collection of hand embroidery. It draws its references in the popular imagery and in the art history. Animals and characters evolve in varied landscapes where spring, summer, autumn and winter follow one another in different depths of field. Velasquez and Chardin rub shoulders with Mickey Mouse, Cézanne and Courbet meet the Lady with the Unicorn, Jesus and a Tahitian woman are close to a naive dolphin, mermaids and sailboats, in a vast confusion of representations, of great anarchic but orchestrated boiling. I build, in a way, a new landscape where all styles and all generations cohabit, without limits of time, kind or space, and where everything merges to become one. It’s the birth of a new territory, whimsical, exuberant, in which all borders, geographical and artistic, are abolished.

What is your inspiration?

I don’t really have a precise source of inspiration for this work; I had been accumulating old pieces for a long time thinking that I would do something with them one day. Those canvases are in a certain kind, the source of inspiration.  Each of my tapestries tells a story, and there are many possible stories depending on the associations of images.

How long does one piece take?

At the beginning it was 8 or 9 months, now 3 or 4. In a way, I have refined and perfected my technique, so I am faster now.

Can you talk us through how you create a piece?

For the first one, I had previously made photocopies of these old canvases and tapestry and started to cut out of them to imagine a composition, a collage (then there is also a paper version). After that, having gained confidence, I cut directly into the canvas, pinned the pieces and sewed them together. I proceed by successive depth of field, from the last plane to the foreground in order to assemble objects, characters or landscapes with similar dimensions. Like a little theater.

Due to the large size, do you use one canvas or join many together?

As I said it before it’s like a patchwork, every piece is assembled one by one, and there are hundreds in one tapestry, to form a 4 meter longer piece.

What type of wool do you use?

I only use coloured threads and an old professional sewing machine to assemble all these pieces.

What are you most proud of so far?

I’m not proud, I am happy. My tapestries are global works, made with the collaboration of several hands, given the important dimensions they reach. But it is not a collaboration in the strict sense of the word as I make my pieces alone.  It is a collaboration a little forced insofar as all these fabrics, these embroidery, these tapestries of various origins and techniques were found in flea markets, garage sales… I often think of the long hours of work that this needleworks required for these women (sometimes may be even men!). Put end to end, they form large frescoes that can also be read as a tribute to all these “ladies works”.

I like this idea and the fact that those “little needlework” became big tapestry, comparable in size, and sometimes in subject matter, to medieval tapestries.

Do you have any advice for aspiring textile artists?

I have no particular advice for future artists, whatever their media and tools, apart from always privileging his freedom and the pleasure of doing.

You can see Aurélia’s work at the following galleries:

Galerie Kamila Regnet https://www.kamilaregentgalerie.com

13^th – 18^th February at the Marguerite Milin in Paris https://galeriemargueritemilin.com

Solo show in June at Galerie-s Mortier in Paris https://www.galerie-s-mortier.com

7-9^th July at the Festival du lin et de la fibre artistique en Normandie https://www.festivaldulin.org

https://aureliajaubert.com/

https://www.instagram.com/aureliajaubert/