Mireille Vautier
Bio
Mireille Vautier was born in France and has been living in New York for a year-and-a half. She received her degree from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Since then, Vautier has been exhibiting her paintings and works on paper in group and solo exhibitions. Her first one-person show in the United States was in March of 2008. She has also worked as an illustrator for many publishers, and received first prize awards at the International Children's Literature Fair in Bologna, Italy, and the Salon du Livre, Montreuil, France. Vautier is currently working on a project involving embroideries on fabric and plastic, initiating a new 3-dimensional approach to her art.
Artist Statement
My most recent work has been embroidery on fabric or plastic. To embroider, for me, is a means of reflecting on memory, such as families' memories. Since embroidery as a custom has today disappeared (in the western world, anyway), many are those that go to flea markets looking for cotton sheets with embroidered initials. Not only for the embroidery's charm, but surely also to read and revive a family's memory that has perhaps since vanished, since that particular linen was never passed on.
Embroidery is also a means of inventing one's own family history, or finding the memories of the body that has wrapped itself in the sheets at night, from beginning to end. I want to imagine that these bodies impress their whole lives on fabric. Embroidery, always... but on another support: plastic. Used plastic bags, long tubular nets. These modest daily objects, non-biodegradable, are becoming useless. I take them, choose them, and try embroidering to give them their nobility.
I use most of the time a red thread. This choice of the color is instinctive. Red is very powerful. In her book, Embroidered Textiles, Sheila Paine writes, "It is the blood of the life and of the death." She writes too that, red is used in many countries in two entirely different ways: to protect and to mark.
The red color is for me like a talisman and a signature.
Embroidery is also a commentary on time, it is an anachronistic and inconceivable thing in today's world where taking one's time is a luxury. It is going against the grain, asserting the necessity of slowing things down in order to look at them.
