LA MAIN NUE: AN ECOSYSTEM OF ART AND CRAFT IN THE FRENCH TAPESTRY CAPITAL
La Main Nue is a community of artists and artisans based in a former tapestry manufactory in Aubusson, a city synonymous with the French textile tradition. The tapestry industry here is supported by the Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie — a museum and training center — as well as by a network of independent manufactories and workshops that sustain a centuries-old savoir-faire.
The community was founded four years ago by Delphine Ciavaldini, a textile artist and scenographer, with the aim of bringing together and promoting the local creative scene that has developed around tapestry. It currently comprises five workshops, a number expected to grow alongside the gradual restoration of the premises. Among its members are established artists such as Laurine Malengreau, Charlotte Kaufmann, and Delphine Ciavaldini herself, active and recognized both in France and across Europe.
Thanks to its proximity to the Cité de la Tapisserie, La Main Nue regularly hosts professional and institutional visitors, benefiting from numerous opportunities for exchange and collaboration. The local context, characterized by a dense and tightly interwoven network, also fosters the development of international projects, such as the upcoming artist residency in Qatar promoted by the Institut Français.
The official inauguration of La Main Nue, held at the end of 2022, attracted 150 visitors (a true success, considering that the city of Aubusson has only about 3,000 inhabitants) including several prominent political and cultural figures from the city and the region. Building on this success, the community decided to organize an event outside its premises. In 2024, a new “hors les murs” edition took place in a castle located 30 kilometers from Aubusson, drawing an increasingly large audience.
Celine Camilleri 2
Charlotte Kaufmann 2
Chloe Chagnaud 1
Following this experience, the Municipality of Aubusson offered the community the use of the former Braquenié manufactory, donated to the city by the textile producer Pierre Frey. La Main Nue accepted the offer, presenting the exhibition La Main Nue – hors les murs in these spaces during the European Heritage Days, in a 1,500 m² exhibition area. The initiative was highlighted by the Ministry of Culture as one of its “favorites” and welcomed 400 visitors at the opening, including the director of FITE, who traveled from Lyon specifically for the occasion.
La Main Nue is not limited to resident artists: every year, the community invites new creatives from its network to participate in its activities and events, continually renewing the dialogue between skills and artistic languages. From the next year onward, the project plans to evolve toward greater structure and organization, consolidating its role as a reference platform for contemporary textile creation.
Deborah Lavot 1
WHO IS LA MAIN NUE HORS MURS 2025
Muriel Blanc Duret
After a career as a design director in commercial and office architecture, Muriel Blanc Duret chose, at midlife, to dedicate herself to learning the tapestry technique in Aubusson, embarking on a new professional path. Her project stems from a desire to create extraordinary carpets, reflecting a profound contemplation on human relationships. Numerous travels to the East, near and far, revealed to her different ways of engaging with the world; many of her most significant encounters took place on the ground, on carpets, which became for her symbols of dialogue, curiosity, and generosity.
In 2023, she founded her own workshop in Aubusson, at the heart of a textile ecosystem in full revival, acquiring ancient knowledge to reinterpret, in her own way, the French tradition of weaving excellence. Her signature style is recognized in flat-woven works with precise contours and double-sided twins, resulting from a unique combination of techniques that she developed and now teaches to students who come to her workshop for an internship for a few weeks. She weaves using French wool spun locally and threads recovered from regional factories and workshops. Her works tell stories of humanity through marks inspired by current events, interpreted with personal and poetic sensitivity.
Deborah Lavot 2
Delphine Ciavaldini 1
Céline Camilleri
Graduated from ESAD Reims in 2002, Céline Camilleri devoted the first part of her artistic career to set design for street performances. Simultaneously, during stays in Uruguay, she explored the potential of plant and animal fibers through tapestry and contemporary basketry workshops.
Since 2016, she has lived in central France, where local wool has become the focal point of her research. She trained with master artisans in hand weaving and bobbin lace techniques, developing a practice that combines repetitive and meditative gestures. In her studio, she translates sensations and impressions derived from immersion in nature into thread, transforming them into spatial compositions that, between sculpture and installation, reveal the deep connection between humans and the landscape.
Her works are exhibited in galleries and salons dedicated to contemporary art and craft. In 2024, her pieces were acquired by the Mobilier National, and in 2025, she was included in the Homo Faber guide.
Delphine Ciavaldini 1
Rachel Lavaud
Rachel Lavaud is a felt artisan. Handmade wool felt arises from an essential process: wool, hot water, soap (optional), physical energy, and time. Felt is considered the oldest textile in the world.
Rachel waits for the moment when the wet fiber, after long manipulation, transforms under the pressure of her hands into a kind of skin — a metamorphosis that reveals the deep affinity between the keratin in wool and human skin. She favors local wool and nearby raw materials, convinced that time, patience, and perseverance can transform even the coarsest fiber into an object, garment, or accessory embodying her vision of authentic, sustainable luxury. She embraces imperfections in the material and natural residues as signs of vitality, tangible reminders of the free life of the sheep from which the wool comes.
Françoise Laperonnie-Varieras
Passionate about drawing and visual arts from childhood, Françoise Laperonnie Varieras enrolled at the National School of Decorative Arts in Limoges at a young age. During the final two years of her studies, under the guidance of Claude Viallat, she deepened her understanding of drawing and color and developed a profound passion for high-warp tapestry. She earned her National Diploma in Fine Arts in 1974 and, as a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, has regularly exhibited her textile works since then.
Francoise Varieras 1
Francoise Varieras 2
Chloé Chagnaud
After obtaining her DNSEP from the Beaux-Arts in Saint-Étienne, Chloé Chagnaud turned to textile crafts and founded her weaving workshop, La Tòrna, in 2014 — a name that evokes the idea of return and repetition in Occitan. She creates accessories and decorative objects on four-harness looms, using natural materials such as cotton, linen, hemp, ramie, wool, and silk. In 2022, she moved to Aubusson to work with the ateliers of La Main Nue, where she learned felting, now an integral part of her textile practice.
Charlotte Kaufmann
Textile designer Charlotte Kaufmann, driven by a deep passion for research and experimentation, creates unique textures through weaving, embroidery, and bobbin lace. She was an artist-in-residence at the Ateliers de Paris, winner of the Grand Prix de la Création de la Ville de Paris, and recipient of the UNESCO/Fondation Culture & Diversité grant. Her textiles, entirely handmade in France, combine instinctive gestures, material accidents, and poetic interpretation, producing surfaces of remarkable expressive strength.
Muriel Blanc Duret 2
Delphine Ciavaldini
Delphine Ciavaldini is a multifaceted artist deeply rooted in textile language. With a background in performing arts, costume, and set design, she constructs symbolic and visionary universes that explore the bonds connecting humans and the necessities that define them. She favors humble and everyday materials, often recycled, using a language that intertwines ethnological, historical, and social dimensions. Her works are exhibited in art centers and galleries in France and abroad, but she prefers public spaces, where engagement with the daily lives of citizens becomes an integral part of her creative process.
Lyse Drouaine
Artist, textile designer, and craftswoman, Lyse Drouaine trained in weaving in Paris and tapestry in Aubusson. Since 2011, she has been creating luminous textiles for interior spaces, where optical and natural fibers — wool, linen, silk, abaca, raffia, paper, copper — intertwine with precision. Each piece is handwoven by the artist or her collaborators in ateliers and manufactories. The illumination of her textiles results from years of R&D in collaboration with specialized studios in optics, mechanics, and electronics. Her luminous textiles generate contemplative, enveloping atmospheres, merging traditional knowledge, design, and technology. These creations, at the intersection of art, architecture, and well-being, can be seen as true slivers of light.
Laurine Malengreau 2
Déborah Lavot
Born in 1985 in Nancy, Déborah Lavot lives and works in Aubusson. For several years, she has developed a multidisciplinary practice at the crossroads of installation, textiles, and performative gesture, exploring themes of belonging, memory, and territory. Her approach, itinerant and contextual, stems from the observation and transformation of found materials. Thread passes through her work as a tool for connection, tension, and narrative, linking spaces, times, and individual and collective experiences. In a world saturated with objects and images, her practice proposes a sensitive alternative, valuing fragments, traces, and modest forms of resistance.
Identity lies at the core of her research, approached in its complexity through personal narratives intertwined with collective stories. Her works blur the boundaries between intimate and social, visible and invisible, offering a fluid and poetic reading of notions of belonging. She has exhibited in France and abroad, including TAMAT – Musée de la Tapisserie in Ath (Belgium), Pulmon Verde in Seville, Galerie Lillebonne in Nancy, and La Plantation in Phnom Penh. During a residency in Lisbon, she produced a series of video installations further exploring sensitive mapping, movement, and material memory.
Laurine Malengreau
Belgian-born Laurine Malengreau has lived in Aubusson, the French tapestry capital, for over thirteen years. After studying art history, she trained in Madrid in the Nuno Silk technique, a nonwoven fabric of natural silk and wool derived from felt. She continues the great tradition of wall tapestries, highly appreciated by collectors and interior designers worldwide.
Lyse Drouaine 1
“In my work, there is a profound transcendence of gesture. A telluric energy passes through me and, by reflection, travels through the work. I try to translate with my fingertips the singular movement of the elements, becoming a conduit for pure emotion. I achieve what I call the ‘right gesture’ when I enter my deep creative phase: alone, kneeling on the floor, working flat in my workshop-den. It takes time. Then, suddenly, a new space-time opens up, where I no longer have reference points, only the acute awareness of the creative act finding its raison d’être. My work speaks of chimeras, movement, and chromatic reflections. It seeks to be alive, while inviting us to breathe more slowly.”
