The elevator will not go up to the top floor. Nor in seventh heaven, as is scribbled on the fifth key. To reach the apartment nestled under the roof, you will have to take the stairs from the fourth landing. Annabelle Jouot resides with her tribe at the top of a building in 11e district of Paris.
She practices her art there, not far from her husband, Julien Ribot, musician, draftsman, director, with a facetious spirit. The fake elevator button is him. ” We maintain permanent artistic exchanges et we would like to be able to continue working side by side”, they confide, when the need for a more spacious place is felt, allowing the realization of monumental tapestries.
And perhaps the organization of workshops in which the weaver might pass on her practice, as she did at Sessùn Almain Marseille, on November 24. “I might set this up in Paris, I have a lot of requests from people who see my work on my Instagram account. »
In the bohemian cocoon with modernist furniture decorated with long-pile Flokati rugs, sheepskin and rustic objects in the style of the 1970s, the home studio coexists with its piano and guitars, skeins of wool and the large loom weave in maple wood, from a family factory in Canada.
The latter makes it possible to produce parts of almost 2 meters on a side, which might be connected by four for very large formats. It sits along a wall usually covered with inspirational images, children’s drawings and pages torn from catalogs of beloved artists – Theo MercierLouise Bourgeois, Valentine Schlegel…
On this wall today, a large format photograph of Niki de Saint Phalle in Tuscany, posing in front of The Empress from Tarot Garden, still under construction. Of this giant sculpture, the brilliant visual artist said: “She is the great goddess, the queen of the sky, the mother, the whore, the emotion, the sacred magic and the civilization. »
Faced with this powerful figure of feminine art, Annabelle Jouot is working on a new creation. Talented photo stylist who has collaborated with numerous publications, then fashion director for magazines with a more artistic dimension, such as Under the influence et Hot hot hot !, she began weaving in 2015 as a parallel activity, then devoted herself fully to it during the first confinement.
« I had had an aesthetic shock in front of spectacular tapestries, at the Miró Foundation, in Barcelona, then at the Fernand-Léger Museum in Biot. I discovered that this medium might be related to art, and not just decorative, like the vintage tapestry hanging in my kitchen. I started to take an obsessive interest in textile artists. Women like Jagoda Buić, Aurèlia Muñoz, and especially Sheila Hickswho, in the 1950s, discovered ancestral pre-Inca weaving and created, on a frame made with nails, these marvelous little weaves, the Minimal. »
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