Marie-Ange Guilleminot

1960 | Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France

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Marie-Ange Guilleminot — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Le Paravent, 1997-2001, wood, steel, textile, variable dimensions, Musée des beaux-arts et de la dentelle, Calais, © Photo: Florian Kleinefenn, © Marie-Ange Guilleminot, © ADAGP, Paris

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— Marie-Ange Guilleminot

French performer, visual and textile artist.

Marie-Ange Guilleminot graduated from the Villa Arson in 1981, and is known for diverting objects from their original function. While her work, which predominantly uses neutral shades of fabric, may be reminiscent of Body Art performances, of the Supports-Surfaces group, or of the painter Simon Hantaï’s folding techniques, it predominantly highlights the poetic aspect of the creative gesture, which is further emphasised by the plainness of the materials. This gesture (embroidery, weaving, folding), documented in the “Salon de la Transformation” public filmed performance, also questions the relationship of the body and of intimacy with the social sphere; each of the viewer’s senses is involved through the use of transitional and convertible objects (Le Chapeau-vie, “the Life-Hat”, 1994). Since 1992 the artist has also created a series of made-to-measure dresses that reveal specific physical characteristics (navel, beauty spots). Le Mariage de Saint-Maur à Saint-Gallen (“Wedding of Saint-Maur to Saint-Gallen”, 1994), celebrated aboard a plane, led the single artist, wearing a white dress weighted with strings of lead beads, from one man at the start to another at the finish, with “a third man, underlying and absent”; her trousseau consisted of a book of men’s handkerchiefs embroidered with Pierre Giquel poems, reflecting on solitude and on the absence of a loved one.

Her works often reference secular clothing traditions, particularly those of Japan and origami: L’Oursin (“The Urchin”, 1998), inspired by the leaf of the Ginkgo biloba, changes with each folding action from a minimal state (bag, cushion, pumpkin, hat, skirt, shroud) to a monumental formation (roof, parachute). The artist uses these gestures as instruments to make a scientific and aesthetic inventory of the world: her Vêtements blancs (“White Clothes”), which replicate the clothes of victims from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, illustrate the 1945 nuclear disaster and in doing so share the collective memory of the Japanese people with the world (1998-2008). The artist was awarded an honourable mention at the 47^thVenice Biennale and has since exhibited in Europe, Japan and the United States.

Cécile Godefroy

From the Dictionnaire universel des créatrices
© Éditions des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2013
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2018