“The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex?” #louisebourgeois
We are very excited to reveal that we will be making a new sleeve this May with French artist Marie Hazard.
At the beginning of the year in Mexico City I encountered Marie by chance at a group show at Mascota Gallery. The walls of white rooms were hung with green tapestries, spirals. A big window on the outside was filled with green trees. Weavings, pulled downwards, extended the thread. I loved them and prowled around the room taking pictures. Marie stood in the centre of the room. She approached me to tell me that she had been following Sendb00ks for a while and, excitedly, we started to talk about the books that inspire her.
A student of Central Saint Martins in London, where she learned to weave, Marie bought her first loom after launching a crowd-funding campaign. She explains in an interview with Sotheby’s that weaving is an intense manual work that requires hours of concentration—it is a quasi-mediative art. Patient, she takes inspiration from books, sometimes weaving the words of writers like Duras, Barthes, Chantal Akerman, Etel Adnan, and Bouvier into her spirals. She is passionate about artists like Louise Bourgeois and Marina Abramovic, and listens to the radio or podcasts while weaving. Marie describes her practice as a necessary process of storytelling. Or, in her own words, “I weave the invisible threads of an intimate story that does not know how to say otherwise.”
After the show at Mascota, Marie spent an incredible three months traveling around Mexico and Brazil, her first time outside of Europe. A few days ago we bumped into each other at Yvon Lambert. Marie told me she is now working on an upcoming exhibition in NYC, opening on the first of June, which will be about that trip. Entitled L’air sous mes pieds, “it is the idea of lightness, movement, air, changes.”
It is the day before I return to Mexico, and at the airport, we start to talk about making a sleeve in time for her NYC exhibition. Marie suggests The Lover, by Marguerite Duras. A mesmerising semi-autobiographical novel that won the Prix Goncourt. It is a coming of age story, about crossing the precipice, pride and courage in an adolescent french girl as she crosses the river in a silk dress and golden shoes to meet a man twice her age. A story that also captures the weightlessness of falling in love, or embarking on a trip - a weaving. Finding the threads and pulling them in until a work—or a story—begins to take shape. Like Marie, Duras’ threads form a spiral that guides us on a trip from the periphery to the vortex.
With a poem woven into the spiral by her long time friend and collaborator Lorraine de Thibault.
Very excited to share this collaboration, with Marie's designs on the sleeve of The Lover - where for the first time we will present the books in person with the original artwork at the great Left Bank Books in NYC.