Méandres, 2023

Béatrice Baulard  

Béatrice Baulard is a textile plasticist whose favourite medium is yarn. For the past ten years, she has used ancestral techniques around yarn and created volumes woven, knitted, crocheted and, more recently, tufted. 
His family gave him the example of what we can make with little: gardeners, mechanics, seamstresses, knitters, embroiderers, cooks, even painters, handymen, welders, winemakers, blacksmiths... She is humbled by this and tries to answer several questions:
– The distribution of domestic tasks in traditional families. In some of her pieces, she inserts and sets a found element: pebble, polished glass, even plastic, provided it looks like a mineral. The contrast of texture with yarns, wool, soft materials par excellence, symbolizes this sharing: for women soft materials, cooking, sewing, knitting, men hard materials, steel, wood, earth.
– The place of beauty in contemporary art. For the past twenty years, discourse has taken on enormous importance, almost more than the creation of the work. While, in her path, she focuses on aesthetics, gesture and the selection of modest materials, with the desire to blur the boundary between plastic arts and art crafts. It aims to evoke wonder, to free oneself from labels, to integrate beauty into the environment.
– The visibility of women artists and even more of women «elderly» artists. She calmly approaches her sixties and readily says that life begins at 50 and has been working for ten years to prove it. Having as luggage only an intense curiosity and a long initiation of the look. She allows herself to use skills that were considered basic in the last centuries, to extract them from an outdated image and to form diffuse sensations, emotions, and reinterpret visual memories.
 

His work is divided between meticulous, tiny works and large formats tufted. Still, it manufactures with a will to exploit remnants, small quantities, dormant stocks of old factories, ensuring its impact on nature and society. To do with what is there, to divert, to value, to make proposals with little, to work with an economy of means.

She uses the phrase of David Bowie, "To grow old is to become the person you always wanted to be."

This slow exploratory work exposes emotions, epidermal reactions to situations and encourages him to change his way of thinking. From an unnoticeable person, she draws today in the light, with the goal of becoming a happy woman, loving and loved, creative and creative.