{"id":833,"date":"2025-02-12T09:03:38","date_gmt":"2025-02-12T09:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.txtilezine.com\/?p=833"},"modified":"2025-01-30T16:59:29","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T16:59:29","slug":"christelle-jeanne-lacombe-the-art-of-weaving-threads-and-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.txtilezine.com\/en\/christelle-jeanne-lacombe-the-art-of-weaving-threads-and-words\/","title":{"rendered":"CHRISTELLE JEANNE LACOMBE: THE ART OF WEAVING THREADS AND WORDS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

| by Barbara Pavan<\/strong> |<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christelle Jeanne Lacombe lives and works in Paris, where for over two decades she has combined her expertise in psychoanalysis with her artistic commitment. A graduate of the \u00c9cole Sup\u00e9rieure des Arts Appliqu\u00e9s Duperr\u00e9 in Paris, she studied art therapy with a specialization in visual arts. These intertwined disciplines feed her singular approach to art, where textile fibers become the medium for deep reflection, striving to embrace the paradoxes of psychic life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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COAexpoOctobre2024 (74 of 76)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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COAexpoOctobre2024 (76 of 76)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

A practicing psychoanalyst for twenty years, and by day a hospital worker for adolescents, Lacombe attentively explores artistic languages that resonate with therapeutic and human dimensions. The textile universe, with its weaves and symbolism, lies at the heart of her artistic practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her works have gained international recognition through a series of significant exhibitions. These include her participation in the Fiber Arts Australian Biennale<\/em> (2025\u20132026) and the Toronto Art Salon 2024<\/em>, represented by the COA Gallery, highlighting the universal appeal of her work. In Italy, her pieces have been shown at the Museum of Textiles and Industrial Tradition in Busto Arsizio in a show titled I segreti del blu<\/em> and in Perugia in the group exhibition Logos<\/em> at the SCD Studio Gallery. In Montr\u00e9al, her works have been exhibited by the COA Gallery and during the Plural Fair, confirming her ability to engage with diverse art scenes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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D\u00e9tail esquisse d’une lettre d’amour8<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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D\u00e9tail esquisse d’une lettre d’amour5<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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D\u00e9tail esquisse d’une lettre d’amour7<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

She was selected for the international exhibition celebrating the centenary of Janina Monkute-Marks at the K\u00e9dainiai Regional Art Museum in Lithuania. Her work was included in Appunti su questo tempo<\/em> \u2014 the international contemporary fiber art biennial \u2014 held at MuRTAC, the Museum of Ancient and Contemporary Embroidery and Textiles in Valtopina, and at CasermArcheologica in Sansepolcro, Tuscany (2022\u20132023), with a catalog published by ArteMorbida<\/em>. Her Italian journey also includes selection for Paratissima Talents<\/em> in Turin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christelle Lacombe came to embroidery as a medium of artistic expression relatively late, only in the past decade. Her journey toward textile work developed gradually, influenced by various aspects of her life and profession\u2014as an artist and as a psychotherapist for adolescents. \u201cIt was the adolescents who use textile mediation,\u201d she explains, \u201cthat showed me the way to this form of expression.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She says: \u201cIn my work with adolescents, we engage in a long process together, a kind of path marked by words and gestures. The gesture weaves, embroiders, like words that spin and wander to the slow rhythm of the work.\u201d Thus, through sewing, assembling, and cutting fabric, a textile piece takes shape. This process represents a kind of emergence or transition, an attempt to root being in sensory experience. The textures and gestures inherent in sewing seem to create boundaries, anchoring both body and world, stitch by stitch, allowing these elements to generate small revolutions and inscribe spaces with traces left by the hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These encounters progressively oriented her creative work toward textiles, driven by a deep interest in questions linking the body to language. Her creative process draws on multiple medium<\/em>: ceramics, printmaking, and textiles. Initially, she explored ceramics and textiles in a search for fictional representations of bodies, playing with the lightness and flexibility of volume. The elasticity of fabric allowed her to dissolve the conventions of figurative grammar, creating forms without figures, without ideas, without intellect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In parallel, Lacombe also explored printmaking, where weaves, loops, and knots became like writings on copper and linoleum plates. She recalls childhood memories of knitting ritournelles<\/em> with her mother, an expert in sewing and knitting, who would say, \u201cWhat are you embroidering, my child\u2026 It has neither head nor tail,\u201d while she was immersed in her craft. In this context, embroidery becomes a metaphor commonly used in popular language to denote the creation of fictions or stories. Since the Middle Ages, embroidery has been a refined technique for adorning fabrics and decorating tapestries that staged true stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fiction de lettre 8 copie<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Fiction de lettre 17 copie<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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web-2257<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

For Lacombe, the creation of fictions through textiles is akin to what a poet does: creating space for meaning, allowing the creative act to resonate with a sense. \u201cFixing the thread of fiction is a necessity to provide a margin to nonsense, to steer clear of the false rigidity of meaning. It is an essential condition for the letter to carry out its work of cutting, turning, grasping, and detaching. The letter can become flesh, provided it keeps moving.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most recognizable elements of Lacombe\u2019s work is a dense pseudo-writing embroidered in blue, graphic marks that evoke a fluid, rapid cursive script with no explicit or readable meaning. Lacombe explains that being, inhabited by language, is overwhelmed by it: a bearer of words that come from within, subverting and reaching them, like words carried in veins. She adds: \u201cThe etymological roots underlying the phonological closeness of the terms \u2018text\u2019 and \u2018textile\u2019 forever bind the notion of text to the lexical field of textiles, working on the unconscious of authors like an obsession, sometimes even as a truth prematurely validated by reason.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lacombe references Derrida\u2019s words, which assert that the essence of a text lies in the concealment of the arrangement, organization, and combination of the threads composing it. She continues by explaining that architecture, arrangement, and structure are concerns for shaping these fictional bodies of text\u2014not only to escape the voracity of understanding but also to temper the excesses of the body that create barren lands. The artist likens the sewing machine to a typewriter, at times lazy, at times impatient. For her, cursive writing is a script that embraces the body\u2014its energy, its movement, its uncertainty, its hesitation, and its urgency to inscribe an act upon a surface. Drawing from Lacan\u2019s Encore<\/em>, she notes that writing is a trace where the effects of language can be read, much like a \u201cscribble\u201d becomes the beginning of what one has to say. This writing, which she calls \u201csmall tongue,\u201d sows seeds scattered across the virgin surfaces of textiles. \u201cI take on the position of a scribe in this work, where cursive letters are a way to bring small tongue back to the surface,\u201d Lacombe explains. Her opposition to meaning becomes, for her, a condition that allows for the creation of an imperfection within the almost perfect mechanics of the sewing machine\u2019s rhythm. In this mechanics, she brings forth insufficiency, errors, boiling, saturation, suspension, cracks, and voids\u2014essential conditions for language to play and create decentered spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Embroidery, with its slowness, patience, and repetitiveness, approaches an almost Zen exercise. Lacombe acknowledges its therapeutic and cathartic component: \u201cThe repetitive gesture is executed under a strong impetus, from which I must let the uncontrollable emerge, while containing it. It\u2019s a gesture that concerns me and situates me in a space.\u201d The loose threads in her embroideries are not just a technical or aesthetic choice but also carry meaning. Lacombe sees these threads as remnants, traces of what is unfinished\u2014a necessary condition for the work to continue. They materialize the small fall. \u201cIn Japanese, everything that leaves a trace is called time. Time and place are conjoined; the trace becomes their site.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Currently, she continues her fiction-making around letters, further exploring graphic elements in colors reminiscent of childhood traces. \u201cI embroider graphic elements close to the disturbance of childhood traces,\u201d she says. She also develops her research on ceramic weaves, where these works respond to each other because \u201cthere are no traces carved without an initial fabric.\u201d Her practice revolves around minimal meanings, articulated at the intersection of warp and weft, verticality and horizontality. She explains that the art of the weaver was metaphorically used in Greco-Roman myths as a tool to untangle complex matters, creating a harmonious, unified fabric worthy of clothing the great goddess of Olympus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lacombe works in small pockets of time, whenever possible. These intervals grant her the freedom not to overexert, ensuring that the thread continues to wander. She cites a Navajo tradition that advises moderation in weaving, even suggesting leaving the work incomplete, with an opening left somewhere. \u201cThese are the conditions that allow for differentiation and articulation between the form of the body and its background.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through embroidery and textile art, Christelle Lacombe weaves not only physical pieces but also complex layers of meaning, blending language, body, and material into a continuously evolving narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jacques Derrida, La Diss\u00e9mination<\/em>, Le Seuil 1972<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jacques Lacan, Encore<\/em>, 1975, St-Amand, Le Seuil, p110, au sujet du texte Litteraterre et de la nu\u00e9e du langage qui fait \u00e9criture. Lacan dans Encore<\/em>, le 15 mai 1973 dit : \u00ab L\u2019\u00e9criture est une trace o\u00f9 se lit un effet de langage. Quand vous gribouillez quelque chose, et moi aussi, je ne m\u2019en prive certes pas, c\u2019est avec \u00e7a que je pr\u00e9pare ce que j\u2019ai \u00e0 dire. Et c\u2019est remarquable qu\u2019il faille, de l\u2019\u00e9criture, s\u2019assurer.\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Scheid, Jesper Svenbro, Le m\u00e9tier de Zeus, Mythe du tissage et du tissu dans le monde grec-romain<\/em>, \u00c9ditions Errance<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

| by Barbara Pavan | Christelle Jeanne Lacombe lives and works in Paris, where for over two decades she has combined her expertise in psychoanalysis with her artistic commitment. A graduate of the \u00c9cole Sup\u00e9rieure des Arts Appliqu\u00e9s Duperr\u00e9 in Paris, she studied art therapy with a specialization in visual arts. These intertwined disciplines feed her singular approach to art, where textile fibers become the medium for deep reflection, striving to embrace the paradoxes of psychic life. A practicing psychoanalyst for twenty years, and by day a hospital worker for adolescents, Lacombe attentively explores artistic languages that resonate with therapeutic and human dimensions. The textile universe, with its weaves and symbolism, lies at the heart of her artistic practice. Her works have gained international recognition through a series of significant exhibitions. These include her participation in the Fiber Arts Australian Biennale (2025\u20132026) and the Toronto Art Salon 2024, represented by the COA Gallery, highlighting the universal appeal of her work. In Italy, her pieces have been shown at the Museum of Textiles and Industrial Tradition in Busto Arsizio in a show titled I segreti del blu and in Perugia in the group exhibition Logos at the SCD Studio Gallery. In Montr\u00e9al, her works have been exhibited by the COA Gallery and during the Plural Fair, confirming her ability to engage with diverse art scenes. She was selected for the international exhibition celebrating the centenary of Janina Monkute-Marks at the K\u00e9dainiai Regional Art Museum in Lithuania. Her work was included in Appunti su questo tempo \u2014 the international contemporary fiber art biennial \u2014 held at MuRTAC, the Museum of Ancient and Contemporary Embroidery and Textiles in Valtopina, and at CasermArcheologica in Sansepolcro, Tuscany (2022\u20132023), with a catalog published by ArteMorbida. Her Italian journey also includes selection for Paratissima Talents in Turin. Christelle Lacombe came to embroidery as a medium of artistic expression relatively late, only in the past decade. Her journey toward textile work developed gradually, influenced by various aspects of her life and profession\u2014as an artist and as a psychotherapist for adolescents. \u201cIt was the adolescents who use textile mediation,\u201d she explains, \u201cthat showed me the way to this form of expression.\u201d She says: \u201cIn my work with adolescents, we engage in a long process together, a kind of path marked by words and gestures. The gesture weaves, embroiders, like words that spin and wander to the slow rhythm of the work.\u201d Thus, through sewing, assembling, and cutting fabric, a textile piece takes shape. This process represents a kind of emergence or transition, an attempt to root being in sensory experience. The textures and gestures inherent in sewing seem to create boundaries, anchoring both body and world, stitch by stitch, allowing these elements to generate small revolutions and inscribe spaces with traces left by the hand. These encounters progressively oriented her creative work toward textiles, driven by a deep interest in questions linking the body to language. Her creative process draws on multiple medium: ceramics, printmaking, and textiles. Initially, she explored ceramics and textiles in a search for fictional representations of bodies, playing with the lightness and flexibility of volume. The elasticity of fabric allowed her to dissolve the conventions of figurative grammar, creating forms without figures, without ideas, without intellect. In parallel, Lacombe also explored printmaking, where weaves, loops, and knots became like writings on copper and linoleum plates. She recalls childhood memories of knitting ritournelles with her mother, an expert in sewing and knitting, who would say, \u201cWhat are you embroidering, my child\u2026 It has neither head nor tail,\u201d while she was immersed in her craft. In this context, embroidery becomes a metaphor commonly used in popular language to denote the creation of fictions or stories. Since the Middle Ages, embroidery has been a refined technique for adorning fabrics and decorating tapestries that staged true stories. For Lacombe, the creation of fictions through textiles is akin to what a poet does: creating space for meaning, allowing the creative act to resonate with a sense. \u201cFixing the thread of fiction is a necessity to provide a margin to nonsense, to steer clear of the false rigidity of meaning. It is an essential condition for the letter to carry out its work of cutting, turning, grasping, and detaching. The letter can become flesh, provided it keeps moving.\u201d One of the most recognizable elements of Lacombe\u2019s work is a dense pseudo-writing embroidered in blue, graphic marks that evoke a fluid, rapid cursive script with no explicit or readable meaning. Lacombe explains that being, inhabited by language, is overwhelmed by it: a bearer of words that come from within, subverting and reaching them, like words carried in veins. She adds: \u201cThe etymological roots underlying the phonological closeness of the terms \u2018text\u2019 and \u2018textile\u2019 forever bind the notion of text to the lexical field of textiles, working on the unconscious of authors like an obsession, sometimes even as a truth prematurely validated by reason.\u201d Lacombe references Derrida\u2019s words, which assert that the essence of a text lies in the concealment of the arrangement, organization, and combination of the threads composing it. She continues by explaining that architecture, arrangement, and structure are concerns for shaping these fictional bodies of text\u2014not only to escape the voracity of understanding but also to temper the excesses of the body that create barren lands. The artist likens the sewing machine to a typewriter, at times lazy, at times impatient. For her, cursive writing is a script that embraces the body\u2014its energy, its movement, its uncertainty, its hesitation, and its urgency to inscribe an act upon a surface. Drawing from Lacan\u2019s Encore, she notes that writing is a trace where the effects of language can be read, much like a \u201cscribble\u201d becomes the beginning of what one has to say. This writing, which she calls \u201csmall tongue,\u201d sows seeds scattered across the virgin surfaces of textiles. \u201cI take on the position of a scribe in this work, where cursive letters are a way to bring small tongue back to the surface,\u201d Lacombe explains. Her opposition to meaning becomes, for her, a condition that allows for the creation of an imperfection within the almost perfect mechanics of the sewing machine\u2019s rhythm. In this mechanics, she brings forth insufficiency, errors, boiling, saturation, suspension, cracks, and voids\u2014essential conditions for language to play and create decentered spaces. Embroidery, with its slowness, patience, and repetitiveness, approaches an almost Zen exercise. Lacombe acknowledges its therapeutic and cathartic component: \u201cThe repetitive gesture is executed under a strong impetus, from which I must let the uncontrollable emerge, while containing it. It\u2019s a gesture that concerns me and situates me in a space.\u201d The loose threads in her embroideries are not just a technical or aesthetic choice but also carry meaning. Lacombe sees these threads as remnants, traces of what is unfinished\u2014a necessary condition for the work to continue. They materialize the small fall. \u201cIn Japanese, everything that leaves a trace is called time. Time and place are conjoined; the trace becomes their site.\u201d Currently, she continues her fiction-making around letters, further exploring graphic elements in colors reminiscent of childhood traces. \u201cI embroider graphic elements close to the disturbance of childhood traces,\u201d she says. She also develops her research on ceramic weaves, where these works respond to each other because \u201cthere are no traces carved without an initial fabric.\u201d Her practice revolves around minimal meanings, articulated at the intersection of warp and weft, verticality and horizontality. She explains that the art of the weaver was metaphorically used in Greco-Roman myths as a tool to untangle complex matters, creating a harmonious, unified fabric worthy of clothing the great goddess of Olympus. Lacombe works in small pockets of time, whenever possible. These intervals grant her the freedom not to overexert, ensuring that the thread continues to wander. She cites a Navajo tradition that advises moderation in weaving, even suggesting leaving the work incomplete, with an opening left somewhere. \u201cThese are the conditions that allow for differentiation and articulation between the form of the body and its background.\u201d Through embroidery and textile art, Christelle Lacombe weaves not only physical pieces but also complex layers of meaning, blending language, body, and material into a continuously evolving narrative. Bibliography Jacques Derrida, La Diss\u00e9mination, Le Seuil 1972 Jacques Lacan, Encore, 1975, St-Amand, Le Seuil, p110, au sujet du texte Litteraterre et de la nu\u00e9e du langage qui fait \u00e9criture. Lacan dans Encore, le 15 mai 1973 dit : \u00ab L\u2019\u00e9criture est une trace o\u00f9 se lit un effet de langage. Quand vous gribouillez quelque chose, et moi aussi, je ne m\u2019en prive certes pas, c\u2019est avec \u00e7a que je pr\u00e9pare ce que j\u2019ai \u00e0 dire. Et c\u2019est remarquable qu\u2019il faille, de l\u2019\u00e9criture, s\u2019assurer.\u00bb John Scheid, Jesper Svenbro, Le m\u00e9tier de Zeus, Mythe du tissage et du tissu dans le monde grec-romain, \u00c9ditions Errance<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":755,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[90],"class_list":["post-833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-christelle-jeanne-lacombe"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t