Manon Gignoux Inspiration

Manon Gignoux is a French artist who makes textile sculptures, clothes objects, makes clothes and accessories. Her choice of color is quite subtle and muted reflecting the drive and love of old objects and clothes, fascination with layers and texture, and simple forms.

The origin of her work can be traced back to the last year of her study at France's Duperre School of Applied Arts  when she made a photographic study of the clothes worn by workers in the early 20th century and where she explored "the wear and tear" on clothes. She extracted four themes from the study: "the carpenter" or the traces of alteration, the "washerwoman" or the imprint of repeated movements, "the inside-out suit" or the dynamics of (de)construction and "the woman shopkeeper" or the encounter between work clothes and everyday life and the way an object is worn to fit the body.

"Encompassing recovery, re-appropriation and aesthetic discrepancy, my raw materials are re-used clothes and objects that retain the memory of their original use and contemporary fabrics that I rework with dyes, pleats and weat.. to which I give a new function. My creations illustrate the meeting of clothes, body and decor.  The clothes I create pass on the experience of living, flattering and deforming the body. My fabric dolls, each a kind of symbolic object, represent attitudes and personalities. I play on the relationship between clothes and object, I dress objects in order to protect them and to tell their story… damaged coverings, darned, made from accumulation and colours faded by time. I also set up installations in which I associate my work with objects that I have found, re-invented and/or photographed." Manon Gignoux

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