isabelle caltot

The sculptures of'Isabelle Caltot does not lack forelock (some even have one on their head). They fire with any wood, or rather any wire, nail, key, chisel, lock, knife. They are joyful and funny, colorful, concentrated, bushy and indecisive. They make you want to become very small, to shrink like Alice to dive in like you used to do in the hay. We feel in the middle of'they in the'magical world of old haberdasheries, lint bins and candy sellers. All the treasures of the world piled up deep in pockets or satchels.

C'is a world of materials. We want to touch. The materials call for gestures, hand techniques: embroider, unravel, mend, sew, wind, pick up, unwind, thread, card, woolen, patch up. Memory passes through the body. Our contemporary lives have lost almost all the gestures that could connect them to the past. Isabelle Caltot cannot resign herself to the manual loss of memory. With her threads, she connects us. It gives a second life to secondary objects, leftovers and waste.

These are poor gestures, which have ceased to be transmitted. The damage done to the land is largely linked to the'forgetting these gestures. They produce here a sort of'primary art where'we see the'immemorial experience of poverty. There is a truth of'history in the waste, in the humblest traces of the humblest existences. Isabelle Caltot belongs to this line of ragpickers who roam the world with their basket and their hook to archive our lives based on what we drop.

In 1972, Annette Messager entitled “The boarders” the little stuffed birds that'she was swaddled in mini wool sweaters. The strength of this installation was due to the proximity of life and death, to the vulnerability of beings and the care that'you have to take them, even when they are dead. This feminine and intimate universe is also that of'Isabelle Caltot, even if hers is less gloomy. His sculptures incorporate the'bird and knitting, entangle the head and the thread, the'animal and wool. They give an unusual imagination to new life. Dead things can be reborn.

Tiphaine Samoyault