Unyielding, Yet Malleable: Diane Gaignoux's "Enveloppes Imaginaires"

Collection Diane Gaignoux / Butons Pauline Bonnet
PHOTOGRAPHY Charlotte Krieger / MAKE-UP & HAIR Céline Exbrayat
Models Eloise Kelso / Arnaud Jamet / Julien Leroy
Marine Eggimann / Louise Marot / Céline Exbrayat / Thomas Kelso
Studio @alveolezero

INTERVIEW Alexa van Abbema

The body, for Diane Gaignoux, has always been another material to explore and play with. For her, it is a vessel; a container; a space of stylized performance; something that is always-already involved in our immediate environment. It leaves traces. And it is also something that is extremely fluid. Drawing on her training in applied arts, Diane creates sculptural silhouettes using malleable materials like felt and silicone that drape over the body, representing “second skins."

Your work focuses a lot on transformation, construction, and motion, as well as transgressing boundaries in a very physical and material sense. In what way does the body as a container/vessel inform your work? When did it become a focal point?

In 2017, I started to look into the notion of « situatedness » and how it impacts the development of an identity. "There is no 'I' who is originally formed and then enters the social world, but rather 'I' have always become a self because of the responses of and to others that have conditioned and instantiated my self-identity" (Butler) I got really into the idea that oneself would always and constantly be moved and shaped by what surrounds it at the same time as what could come from it. The idea of fluid body never fixed, always in metamorphosis. Always in mutation. I saw a parallel between the cultivation of oneself and the process of bricolage: one personality would be constructed through actions such as collecting, pasting, layering, etc.

I wanted to explore this reflection on the body enveloppe and the sculpture of the self in my BA collection at Central Saint Martins, and transferred these actions into technical practices in order to create garments. I attempted to highlight the spontaneous process of bricolage where mistake is taking part in the development, where anything that happens is impacting the shape. The idea that the dress is a rhapsody made out of fragments coming from here and there, but all interlinked in the fibers. I considered the felted garments of the collection as personal tapestries, where one could develop and expand its own story. On one of the dresses, the motif said "The container or the content? ».

What drew you to use felt and silicone (more mailable materials), in particular? As opposed to other inorganic materials to represent the body.

It started to use mailable materials when I was doing my BA at Central Saint Martins in 2018. My collection was focusing on how oneself would tend to sculpt its own identity while being at the same time shaped by its environment. I researched on how to sculpt with knitwear similarly to how I would have played with clay, so I started to look into felt also because this material refers to the skin, the enveloppe. All the different elements used in the collection made sense by their relation to sculpture. We find the imprint of the gesture in the use of felt, knit, ceramic, silicone, and plastic clay, which are all the different techniques I am using in this collection. Each of these materials reveals the irregularities of a manual process each time renewed and unique. I am interested in developing my own materials, conceiving the garment from its fiber to its shape. I am working with a living material that defines itself while felting, regardless of the previous attempts to control it. I like having to adapt to the fabric, to do with what has been produced because the shape can no longer be changed. To me, this revisited felting technique is an encounter, a play with the material, which I could not have found in a constructed material. Also, the brushed felt is an animal textile, inanimate and alive at the same time, giving a presence to the dress. It is a body in itself, which cannot be made twice exactly the same.

How did making clothes allow you to explore other mediums? How do you see sculpture and performance in this conversation about the body-in-constant-flux?

We are contained by cloth. I have always been passionate about the history of clothing that shapes bodies and the way we look at them. For me, garments are roles and dressing is a performance! Everyone tinkers with their appearance in order to play in the theatrical staging of everyday life. I tried to explore this idea in a performance I created in 2019 called « Expeausition ». It took the form of a défilé where bodies were parading with painted clothes on them. They were performing the typology of garment that was attributed to them. Beyond simple garments, the uniforms seem to infuse into the porous bodies.

The texts accompanying the performance were highlighting the idea that clothing can become a conventional definition, with which we can trace the historical developments of the perception of bodies and the perpetual attempt to tame them. Coming from that, dressing up can also be a playful bricolage of the self and take part in how we tend to shape ourselves. It can be an alter-ego or just one facet of ourselves that we explore The object of clothing in itself can also become a kind of shell, a receptacle to be inhabited. Clothing can be easily linked to theatre and performance through that spectrum but also to sculpture. In this collection, every look is a character. It is time to dress up, to embody another self! The colors that blend into each other participate to this idea of transformation. And the joker monster motifs that run on the fluffs of the outfits are the multiple protagonists that inhabit us.

We normally think of our bodies, and skin in particular, as something that that is affected by the outside world—environmental stressors, and anything we come into close contact with. But it is also something that lives beyond us; something that has “an independent existence apart from [us].” Your past work, Vessel, for example, also explored this sentiment. For you, how does clothing represent this second skin?

I am very inspired by an idea coming from Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, an Anthropological theory saying that « human emit aspects of themselves in what might be called eidolata, ‘skins’ or bits that come from them, but then have some kind of independent existence apart from them. So their personhood becomes distributed in the milieu, beyond the body boundary. » It implies that we project ourselves in the objects we collect, we use to surround ourselves with. Therefore, every object becomes a kind of receptacle or extension of our bodies. I am really passionate with this idea of fragmented incarnations and I think clothing is the perfect object to represent it as we inhabit them and vice-versa. They keep the imprint of our presence and at the same time they impact and contain us. Clothing is to me a metaphor of the skin seen as a layer in between the outside and the inside. It keeps the traces of the body, the residues of use and can be a receptacle of memory. Our transformations are tied up with it.

The collection itself has an extremely sculptural element—in both shape and the processes of assembly. Can you speak on your process?

The main pieces of the collection are made out of felt. It is a collection of sculpted bodies, waiting to be inhabited. The irregular, rounded, generous shapes and the fierce gaiety of the colors echo the women of Niki de Saint-Phalle, but also the bigshouldered suits of the sculpted ladies from the 80s and 90s. The felting process is in itself a practice of sculpting and molding. The clothes are seamless, made in one piece. The making of these pieces goes through several stages that attempt to control and direct the living material: they are first prepared at a scale x 1,52, which is the shrinkage coefficient of the cloth. The shape is then preconceived in wool assembled wool fibers and knitted motifs. Later, the dyes are hand painted on the large piece. After several days of drying, the garment is ready to be felted.

At this stage, the material defines itself, regardless of the previous attempts to control it. In this metamorphosis, the textile is the denominator of its own form, by chance and by the living. It is a body sculpting itself. The pieces are then polished and fully shaped with hot water and soap. However, it is about working with what has been produced earlier because the shape can no longer be changed. This process engages the body, firstly by the size of the preconceived object and secondly by the shaping work requested by the material. The time required to work on each piece seems to be a way of charging the garment with sacredness and rarity. Hence my interest in artisanal practices that could be defined as acts of transforming through precious gestures.

Why is it important for you to work with multiple mediums at once? To create work in this kind of in-between space?

I am interested in creating narratives. Objects coming from the imaginary resonating with what we live and proposing a reflection on it. I have always been very admirative of artists like Bob Wilson for example, who are able to build a whole world of their own through costume making, scenery, music, etc and invite us in it. Studying fashion helped me conceive that one project come to live because of the confluence of several artistic disciplines. You need the work of the photographer, the model, the make-up artist, to complete your proposal and present what you had in mind.

This meeting point with other practices and artists started to be a drive in my work, and one of the reasons why I am creating. As we don’t live in a world where only clothing exists or objects but where everything is always in a dialogue with each other, wether it is through tension or completeness, I feel like one practice starts to make sense when in relation to another. To me, this in-between space is a space of echoing, of resonating, allowing each discipline to go a bit further.