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Les Nouvelles June 2023
Sabine Cibert ● Contemporary Textile Art

Extract from the magazine “Les nouvelles” Patchwork et Création Textile published by Association France-Patchwork

Visiting the exhibition Thaw, on show at the Showroom Galerie 7 in Lyon, France from 9 February to 9 March 2023, sparked our desire to meet the artist, Sabine Cibert.

Sabine Cibert is a youthful artist. While she was born in 1956, she only embarked on her artistic career in 2013. And her interest in textiles and their large formats dates from her childhood experience of seeing Jean Lurçat’s Chant du Monde, triggering an initial shock which had an almost physical effect on her 7-year-old self.

After graduating in architecture, she pursued a classic 35-year career in city planning, all the while building up a collection of textiles in a wide range of fibres and colours. She attended the various Biennales de la Tapisserie in Lausanne, was a regular visitor to the Vasarely de Gordes museum, devoured quilting catalogues and learned about the modernist Bauhaus artists.

In the meantime, she learned patchwork techniques from a teacher, copying myriad ancient quilts. This fuelled her fascination for mathematical and geometrical shapes. In addition to the technique and care needed in quilting, she gained awareness of the infinite variability and omnipresence of textiles: they are our first contact with the outer world as we are swaddled after birth, we are wrapped in textiles all our lives and have been since the dawning of humankind.

As she learned, her penchant for colour outstripped that of the actual object. She thus broke free from the benchmarks in traditional quilting to explore the world of colour while continuing her manual work. After her initial works nurtured by the world of painting that forged her, she asserted her own style, drawing on a more personal inspiration.

From the lake in Annecy in her childhood to the thawing of Mont-Blanc glaciers, which she contemplates from her Alpine studio, she evokes atmospheric phenomena, abruptly shifting light and forces of nature, in gigantic textile compositions.

” It is, in a sense, the capture of deep and telluric vibrations, of furtive accidents that produce disorder, although each piece is composed slowly and patiently in a quasi-meditative process. “

Emergence Exhibition, March 2017

By dint of exposing the seams joining her various textiles, Sabine Cibert has created a new material. To achieve this, she sought out technical solutions to ensure that her entirely hand-crafted compositions would hold together, harmoniously. She experienced this discovery as evolutionary rather than disruptive. Her new-found liberty engendered new risks. She defines herself as an artist who works with textiles as a medium rather than a textile artist.

Sabine Cibert works on series in order to explore the effects of her textile selections to the full, with large formats alongside smaller and intermediate ones. She uses the same textiles and colour ranges to ever-changing effect. She names the series once she has designed and partly executed the work: Running Water, Skin of the World, Thaw. Sabine’s impetus mainly springs from a harmony of colour or hues after years of sorting and compiling textile repertories.

” The construction and tonal landscape of each piece is supremely poetic [..] and unique, where each panel is a singular entity that invites the reflection of both light and thought […] Sabine Cibert adapts her work to the slow pace of each day, allowing for the interplay of light and shadow as bits of fabrics are gradually sewn together as her inspiration is formalized.”

A world of rhythmic forms, January 2017
Chantal Danjou, poet, novelist, essayist

Sabine Cibert uses drawings and lines of force on tracing paper to inform her designs; she then makes a digital sketch on which to place values and colours, while also selecting the ranges of fabrics to be used. She notes the reference number for each fabric chosen on her plan, while visualising them in her head. Then it is time to cut the pieces out and pin them to her core fabric laid out on the floor, to ensure that each piece is in its rightful place. Next, she assembles separate blocks then puts these blocks together. At last, the final product starts to take shape prior to the quilting stage. For this last stage, a photo is printed out, which the artist then draws on. Lastly, she sews the fabric together according to her motif that teases out the colour scheme and brings a new energy to the whole.

” As winter envelops the earth in a cosy blanket of snow, contemplation knows no thaw, time is suspended on branches as icicles.
Tomorrow and the next day lay veiled beneath a silken sheen, that a heedful hand will lift once the time is right… “

Françoise Chabert-Blanc, January 2023

The Thaw series transpired further to meditations on the colour white for which there are many different words in certain civilisations beyond Europe. Her meditations have informed the rendering of its multiple nuances of colour and material, sensation, emotion and even sound.
This exhibition was an opportunity to explore new formats. The huge Winter 1 (174 x 268 cm) faces off a series of smaller 31 Snow compositions (15 x 15 cm), which point to our perception of the effects of light on frozen water and snow. Alongside these, the vertical Avalanches have been achieved using even smaller squares (3 x 3 cm).

And then Dawn, a small panel heralding the promise of spring, adds a touch of colour, hinting at an upcoming new series by Sabine Cibert.

Laurence Le Page and Thomas Leveugle

Photographs

Virtual tour