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Gallery NOSCO Rue Lebeau 43, BrusselsA Feminine group exhibition through the eyes of female, male and non gender artists. Picture : Caio Marcolini, BLTS03 (Detail) - bilateral series, 2022 Copper wire weave 90x70x30cm
Gallery NOSCO
Discover"Turning Trauma into Beauty" - Isabelle. D
Isabelle. D – Turning Trauma into Beauty - from January 19 to March 4 2023
Isabelle. D’s work is a woven, crocheted, unravelled work. As is often the case with textile works, in it we feel
the time in an ineluctably acute way. The time it took to produce each of these stitches. And as often with textile
works, in it we can feel the body of the artist in a remarkably persistent way. The agile fingers it took to weave
each of these threads. It is all the spice of Isabelle. D’s work; the foam of a full- overfull working time, where
just what is needed to suit this human being who doesn’t cease working. The exhibition is a chromatic tide, a
wave, especially purplish, which dilutes into pastel particles, unfurls, dies away. It is a blue in the sense of a bruise.
The result of a daily, persistent and curative practice.
Isabelle. D grew up in Algeria. She has a French-Algerian maternal grandfather. An “exploited-cultivator”
grandfather, she says. She also says she knows the suffering of the Algerian people. And other sufferings,
bruising, scars of female bodies, of familiar bodies, of bodies of her blood. Women she adores. It is about sadness
camouflaged by bright colours and bruises hidden by other colours. An autobiographical and self-taught palette.
How does she then work with textiles? In the way of kaketsugi – the Japanese art of invisible sewing-repair -
they come to her in small pieces at the time of a bereavement: spouses give what is left in a work basket. She
dismantles, thread by thread. She also sources herself, goes to search for them where work takes her. Here too,
she undoes, remakes, creates her colours, her textures. Sometimes, because they originate from somewhere she
saw something painful. So, Isabelle. D has her own palette, no colour is what it used to be. With these colours,
she paints something where there is no emptiness – and no silence.
Tell her story, or her childhood ‘s traumas? Not doing it is not even a matter of modesty, she simply would not
“have the courage” to do so. But embroidery, crochet, which she has been practising since childhood, that’s fine.
She needs to go over and over again. With the plastic, with the thread, with the visible or invisible knots, with
stretching, rolling up or cracking umbilical cords.
Painter, philosopher, and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger wrote about her own work: “The passage from the
shock through the trauma to the full-fledged testimony may take 40 years. It takes a way to express oneself with
a language1.” Nicolas Bourriaud added about her “Ettinger invents a painting of history that never evokes the
past [ … ] she paints neither the holocaust nor the war, but the traumas they have generated [ … ]. Therefore
her work falls within the area of the traumatology: it is a general study of the shock. The trauma is an injury
sustained by the organism, and the traumatism is the resulting wound2.
The traumatology. One day Isabelle. D said a great truth. She was told to keep quiet. She finally found the way
of expressing herself.
Discovering Isabelle. D’s work, I obviously thought of the work of Margaret and Christine Weirthem. It is not
always really beneficial to mention formal similarities between two works – and the sisters’ sculptures tell stories
of corals, of plant and animal death and of mathematics – but in the case of these two practices something occurs
to hold them together behind the eyelids. One visualizes the powerful echo of a technique-material diffusing,
between the most distant places and bodies, because it is the most adequate: compulsive and lively, it is the one
emancipating from the fingers and bodies of women. So the resemblance here is like the sign of a magical
sorority.
Ettinger also writes: “my hand-heart was signing what I could barely admit3”. I love this hand-heart. And Isabelle.
D’s hand-heart gives us so many presents.
Eva Barois De Caevel, January 2023
Isabelle. D’s work is a woven, crocheted, unravelled work. As is often the case with textile works, in it we feel
the time in an ineluctably acute way. The time it took to produce each of these stitches. And as often with textile
works, in it we can feel the body of the artist in a remarkably persistent way. The agile fingers it took to weave
each of these threads. It is all the spice of Isabelle. D’s work; the foam of a full- overfull working time, where
just what is needed to suit this human being who doesn’t cease working. The exhibition is a chromatic tide, a
wave, especially purplish, which dilutes into pastel particles, unfurls, dies away. It is a blue in the sense of a bruise.
The result of a daily, persistent and curative practice.
Isabelle. D grew up in Algeria. She has a French-Algerian maternal grandfather. An “exploited-cultivator”
grandfather, she says. She also says she knows the suffering of the Algerian people. And other sufferings,
bruising, scars of female bodies, of familiar bodies, of bodies of her blood. Women she adores. It is about sadness
camouflaged by bright colours and bruises hidden by other colours. An autobiographical and self-taught palette.
How does she then work with textiles? In the way of kaketsugi – the Japanese art of invisible sewing-repair -
they come to her in small pieces at the time of a bereavement: spouses give what is left in a work basket. She
dismantles, thread by thread. She also sources herself, goes to search for them where work takes her. Here too,
she undoes, remakes, creates her colours, her textures. Sometimes, because they originate from somewhere she
saw something painful. So, Isabelle. D has her own palette, no colour is what it used to be. With these colours,
she paints something where there is no emptiness – and no silence.
Tell her story, or her childhood ‘s traumas? Not doing it is not even a matter of modesty, she simply would not
“have the courage” to do so. But embroidery, crochet, which she has been practising since childhood, that’s fine.
She needs to go over and over again. With the plastic, with the thread, with the visible or invisible knots, with
stretching, rolling up or cracking umbilical cords.
Painter, philosopher, and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger wrote about her own work: “The passage from the
shock through the trauma to the full-fledged testimony may take 40 years. It takes a way to express oneself with
a language1.” Nicolas Bourriaud added about her “Ettinger invents a painting of history that never evokes the
past [ … ] she paints neither the holocaust nor the war, but the traumas they have generated [ … ]. Therefore
her work falls within the area of the traumatology: it is a general study of the shock. The trauma is an injury
sustained by the organism, and the traumatism is the resulting wound2.
The traumatology. One day Isabelle. D said a great truth. She was told to keep quiet. She finally found the way
of expressing herself.
Discovering Isabelle. D’s work, I obviously thought of the work of Margaret and Christine Weirthem. It is not
always really beneficial to mention formal similarities between two works – and the sisters’ sculptures tell stories
of corals, of plant and animal death and of mathematics – but in the case of these two practices something occurs
to hold them together behind the eyelids. One visualizes the powerful echo of a technique-material diffusing,
between the most distant places and bodies, because it is the most adequate: compulsive and lively, it is the one
emancipating from the fingers and bodies of women. So the resemblance here is like the sign of a magical
sorority.
Ettinger also writes: “my hand-heart was signing what I could barely admit3”. I love this hand-heart. And Isabelle.
D’s hand-heart gives us so many presents.
Eva Barois De Caevel, January 2023
Images
Exhibitions & Events from Gallery NOSCO
About Gallery NOSCO
Gallery Nosco was founded in London in 2007 with a newly Belgium branch in 2023. The gallery ethos is about cultural exchanges, running residency programs to further dialogue and enrich the difference between conceptualism, practices, political environments and cultural history in a contemporary art society. The gallery operates its programme of exhibitions from a modest space in Sablon, Brussels – Belgium with private first floor window dedicated to a parallel program of younger contemporary artists, The Licker. Off site exhibitions are held from London – UK and Marseille – France while focusing on Latin America for the last 10 years but also working with artists from the US, Europe and Africa.
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