Marie-Ghislaine Beaucé
Website: www.marieghislainebeauce.weebly.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/mariegbeauce
Marie-Ghislaine Beaucé is a French artist, born in 1951, whose journey is deeply rooted in her fascination with textile materials and their artistic potential. Her exploration of different textures, colours, and forms has led her to develop a distinct visual language that merges the tactile quality of textiles with the conceptual rigour of geometric abstraction. Her compositions are punctuated and delimited by rhythmic layers of fabrics, employing woven techniques of ribbons and superposition of padded tubes, suggesting a sense of movement and progression, and showcasing the artist's unique approach to textile art.
Marie, your work engages deeply with the tactile intelligence of textiles. Fibers that once served utilitarian or decorative roles are reanimated into complex, abstract compositions that often challenge traditional binaries such as art versus craft, softness versus structure, and intimacy versus monumentality. How do you conceptualize this transition from functionality to fine art, and in what ways do you see your practice as part of a broader feminist or revisionist lineage that reclaims textile from domestic invisibility?
I have always been interested by textiles and their potential to be manipulated and used for various purposes. Were not natural fibre fabrics created and used in home improvement and decoration as well as clothing to change, define and shape the world we live in? They have been created to give warmth and protection, imply status, identity, and provide a support for creativity. From the simple structure of woven cloth made of intertwined vertical and horizontal threads, geometry and abstraction have been present in art representation for a long time. I am referring, for instance, to a painting by 17th century French artist, Nicolas Poussin, called “Bacchanals with a lute player” in which the skirt of the sitting female musician in the fore front of the picture, clearly shows under close scrutiny, the profound structure and quality of the woollen cloth, transforming it into a work of abstract art in its own right.
My work is based on the magnified representation of traditional woven techniques, mixing and layering strips of fabrics, varying in textures, thickness and colours, resulting in hybrid creations between traditionalism and plasticism, in a tapestry-like form. The employment of quality and luxurious textiles is a major factor in the richness of the overall compositions. By the use of elegant fabric left-overs, my work is far removed from “Arte Povera”, but could it be determined by a contemporary and fashionable word: “Up-cycling”?
You speak of “structural design” as a means to evoke mysterious, ungraspable realms, spaces that exist beyond literal perception and can only be accessed through abstraction. Could you elaborate on how the material density, chromatic layering, and tactile juxtapositions within your panels function not merely as aesthetic choices, but as portals into emotional or metaphysical territories?
In my work each piece of fabric is carefully selected. I play with structure and density, opacity and shine as well as with the thickness of the ribbons of fabric, which I use flat or padded, in tube-like shapes of various diameters; the intersections of the woven bands produce soft vibrations created by the crossing of varied colours and textures, the shading of the padded tubes implementing a transformation on the background through different lightings and, indeed, with the changes of light through the day. This is particularly noticeable with the use of velvet fabric and other shiny materials like silk or polyester; I always get disappointed by the photography of my work because the pictures hardly represent the vibrancy of the finished artwork; for that reason I am reluctant to present my production in a digital form. The interaction of added layers and intricate interlacing produces visual holes whose depth can be interpreted as a representation of the metaphysical realm.
Having worked for decades as an artisan designing luxurious interiors for homes and yachts across Europe, how has your intimate knowledge of textile as a functional and ornamental medium informed the way you now treat it as a conceptual material? Do traces of spatial design, curated comfort, private opulence, performative elegance still haunt the formal choices of your current abstractions?
From the start of my career as a seamstress in interior design I have been very reluctant to throw away the remnants of fabrics I worked with, because of their quality, varied shades of colours and patterns, thinking that one day I could use them in a personal creative way. When I started working on my artistic journey in 2015, I had accumulated quite a number of luxurious pieces of fabrics, silk cloth in particular. I always start a piece which shall be the interpretation of one of my initial designs made from simple printing sessions with ink on paper, though not always in colour; because of my studies at the National School of Fine Arts in France I am strongly influenced by the Bauhaus design concept. For this reason and for the nature of textile weaving, my choice is to work in semi-abstraction. In our daily environment, essentially digital, furnished in dull colours, I think that we need softness and elegance to enlighten our lives.
In your panels, one often senses a negotiation between rhythm and rupture. Repeating lattices of form are interrupted by unexpected insertions such as crocheted elements, padded tubes, or abrupt material contrasts. Do you see this compositional strategy as echoing larger life patterns, emotional fluxes, or even societal tensions? How do you choreograph tension and harmony within the woven language of your work?
I always start a composition by the structure of the background which is mainly rhythmic and geometric, in a woven pattern, bringing order and stability to the piece. Geometry seems to reveal a secretive and deep complicity between our spiritual logic and the structure of the outside world; the geometric construction presents itself like a group of volumes and surfaces which is important to closely bind together. The overlapping layers of fabrics, padded tubes or knitted forms create an undulation, a sinuosity which brings a feeling of movement and contrasts as well as breaks from the rigour of the background. This is the role of the sinuous shapes which complement and replace the static symmetry of the original structure enhanced by the harmony of colours.
Your biography reveals a lifelong obsession with fabric, from weaving filmstrips and cardboard at Beaux-Arts Nantes to costuming ballet performances in London’s theatres. In what ways do you perceive your creative evolution as a continuum rather than a series of chapters, and how does your work today remain in dialogue with that early girlhood dream of becoming a fashion designer?
Fashion design, costume design for ballet or theatre, involve creativity, research of colour and texture juxtapositions, shapes and forms, control over the materials; and so does the conception of my pieces. In fashion design the type of chosen fabric for a model strongly dictates the style of garment to create by the way it hangs on the body. In my work, some of the shapes fluidity can be compared to the undulation, suppleness of a ‘drapé’ produced by a light fabric.
Geometric abstraction has often been associated with rigour, rationality, and control, yet in your hands, it becomes a sensual and meditative experience, almost organic in its unfolding. How do you reconcile the visual grammar of abstraction with the unruly, emotional, and often deeply autobiographical associations that your textile materials inevitably carry?
My pieces are built from a simple structure which is shaped from rigorous geometric construction and the character of the involved materials, an intricate relation between structure and fluidity. Colours play an important role in my work: I have often been qualified as a colourist. Apart from two of my pieces where I chose to use natural tones and white fabrics, the juxtaposition of highly colourful and softer tones in a piece brings a sense of unity and serenity, although the composition may seem complex in the rigidity of the geometric abstract background.
Your works are frequently described as being inspired by nature, its chromatic richness, its spiritual cadence. Yet rather than directly depicting natural scenes, you seem to abstract their sensations into woven gestures and chromatic tensions. Could you speak about how nature informs your internal colour logic and whether you see this as a spiritual engagement or a formalistic one?
Some of my works have been described as being inspired or influenced by nature: in particular “Tissage 4”, composed of a rich green and yellow palette with touches of blue and natural colour. The colour green is a favourite of mine, I feel it as a vector of peace, harmony and serenity. I have always been sensible to the tonality, luminosity or subtlety of colours of the natural environment: my favourite season of the year being autumn, with its display of rich yellow, copper and red, incorporated within the dark green hues of persistent foliage. My aim is to encourage my audience to become more aware of the beauty of natural elements, colour wise of course, if not in a formalistic representation.
The language of your panels, part patchwork, part plasticism, evokes a hybrid visual syntax that resists easy categorization. How do you navigate or perhaps intentionally blur the critical boundaries between painting, sculpture, and textile installation? Do you see your work as resisting the white cube's expectations in favour of something more tactile, embodied, and intuitive?
To give full flight to my inspiration I need material and tactile relief. I agree that it is tricky to place my work in any category of artistic definition. Two of my pieces, “Monochrome Weaving” and “Lock Down”, can be qualified as sculpture, as they are absolutely three-dimensional. My “tapestries” include some three dimensional elements most of the time. I tend to avoid the flat surface of a classic wall artwork in favour of a half sculptural effect.
The act of layering fabric, of stitching time into matter, implies slowness, a temporality that defies the accelerated pace of contemporary digital culture. Is there a political or philosophical dimension to the tempo of your making? How do you understand the relationship between your slow, deliberate processes and the world’s current obsession with immediacy and surface?
It is true that the construction of my pieces is quite a slow process, by cutting and sewing the bands of fabrics, involving a lot of hand stitching to secure each intersection on the background canvas, neatly finishing the bands extremities, but I do not think about it: it is part of the creation and assemblage of each work.
In winning accolades such as the International Prize Botticelli and being featured in art fairs from Basel to Miami, your work has entered an international stage. How do you remain grounded in the intimacy and tactility that define your practice even as your audience expands across languages and geographies? Do you believe textile art offers a universal language, or is it paradoxically one of the most culturally and contextually specific media we have?
Fortunately, textile art has been wildly recognized as an Art form for some years now with the prominence of many practitioners, issuing from countries with strong textile traditions. It was extremely rare to celebrate textile artists, like the American Sheila Hicks and the Catalan Grau-Garriga, until about fifteen to twenty years ago. Now, it is more generally accepted that some artists, like Louise Bourgeois for instance, were also involved in textile art for some time.
Art, in general, conveys a universal expression whatever the chosen support; I am honoured to receive prestigious international rewards in recognition for innovation and personality and to be invited to show my work worldwide.