Welcome to a celebration of creative, visionary women who reveal the excellence in everyday objects. Belgium is Design launches “The Gift to be Simple“, a contemporary exhibit curated by trendsetters Lidewij Edelkoort and Philip Fimmano. Natural materials are transformed by a new generation of female designers from Belgium as part of NY Textile Month VII, running October 2 through October 10.
Get a sneak peek at some of the featured artists and their work below:
EMMA COGNÉ
Designer and artist Emma Cogné, a graduate of La Cambre’s textile design department in Brussels, finds her artistic process in the revaluation and transformation of craft techniques and use of materials. Textiles, for her, are a means to widen the sensorial qualities that are specific to spatiality, engaging the personal experience of users. By showing our houses’ bare structures and layers, Cogné reveals unique aspects of matter and color, creating a bond with our everyday built environment. Her work gives rise to furniture and site-specific art installations that create transitions between inside and outside, and that echo our need for intimacy.
THE COLLECTION
Clareira is a rug created in the Museum of Popular Art in Lisbon. Born of a collaboration between two designers and a Portuguese weaving craftswoman, it is made of the Stipa Gigantea reed, a natural fiber from the Beselga area located in Northeast Portugal. Clareira creates an intimate space, an invitation to relax in the context of a shared environment. Its name, which means “clearing,” refers to the idea of openness and light. The team used the Ponto braiding technique, traditionally made by women, to create a dense, solid weave. The three circles merge into a sensual shape that protects and embraces the body. Around this shape, the fibers emerge in their raw form, drawing soft and sensory borders.
ALEXIA DEVILLE
Curiosity and passion are the key words driving the creative approach at Tenue de Ville, the creative studio launched in 2014 that produces high-end wallpapers created by Alexia de Ville. Each design is the conclusion of artistic research, intern collaboration and a new perspective for an interior, hand-drawn by Alexia and her team. All products are made in Belgium, using waterbased inks and FSC-certified papers.
THE COLLECTION
Born from the desire to recycle the waste created for her wallpaper collections, Alexia de Ville started to collect her production scraps and sought a way to reuse them around a project that made sense and met her strong ecological values. She then began to assemble these strips of wallpaper in the form of weavings sometimes tinted with natural pigments. Working these paper weavings as in a textile, patterns appear thanks to the woven rhythms and the colors. Handmade in Belgium, the results are unique tapestries one can frame or hang, reflecting soft tones and sober design.
NATALIA BRILLI
Natalia Brilli worked for more than 20 years in the world of fashion before starting a new chapter for her brand, creating works sheathed in recycled leather, tapestries and raffia objects, ceramics and furniture. Oscillating between surrealist and symbolic influences, Brilli collects, in the form of a cabinet of curiosities, objects defined in turn as talismans or fetishes. These gris-gris, good luck charms or simply relics embody a sacred dimension and help define a universe where everything is humanized by use. “I try to give nobility to the simplest things, to transform these everyday objects into that which is luxurious and rare, to make them true hybrids between crafts, sculptures and installations.” Through her formal vocabulary, Brilli attempts to offer a contemporary version of the vanity in minimal form, thus provoking a memento mori as disturbing as it is seductive.
THE COLLECTIONS
The tapestries and raffia objects are made in a family workshop in Madagascar. Brilli then works on the pieces to sheath them. All the leathers come from the dormant stocks of French and Italian luxury tanneries, which is why most of the creations are limited and numbered editions. For the furniture, the designer collaborates with Belgian cabinet makers.
PASCALE RISBOURG
Pascale Risbourg belongs to a generation of curious and connected designers who continue to develop an open-ended artistic language. Whether she is working on bespoke wallpaper, hand-tufted carpets or artistic ceramics, she always offers exceptional pieces designed through a creative and intuitive process.
Other participants include: Design for Resilience – Vanessa Colignon; Laure Kasiers; Charlotte Lancelot; Geneviève Levivier; Céline Vahsen. Find the full details on the show here.
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