TOKYO-2017

The revenantes

  • Photographer
    Christine Mathieu

While exploring the collections of several Norman museums, I was able to admire and then photograph Norman women's headdresses and needle and bobbin lace ornaments. I was fascinated by the quality of these subtle elaborations that are the work of modest women who remain in anonymity. My photographs are a tribute to this intense and demanding work of patience. These women, while humbly continuing their domestic work, were able to transcend their condition by expressing their creativity. They left us these beautiful pieces. They are, for me, ordinary fairies, magicians of everyday life, they have brought into their homes, through the perfection of their technique, the taste of beauty, respect for values ​​associated with creativity. To evoke the difficulty and the beauty of this transcendence, I began to make a set of caps using ordinary metallic frames: sheep gratings, pantry grills, etc. Cut-outs, montages, lacings, quilts: my archaic reminiscence assemblages evoke the exoticism of the shapes of these headdresses, sometimes so strange that they seem to come from elsewhere, powerful and magical. These creations are photographed on a black background, they complete a corpus of images where pass silently headdresses and pieces of lace. Shadows, ghosts, elves, bodies and faces present or suggested remain suspended in an atmosphere of meditation. It seemed important to me to put back into the current of contemporary artistic creation these testimonies of an intimate experience related to the history of the condition of women.