The lineage of the spinners
Man achieves maturity when he rediscovers the seriousness with which he used to play as a child. Friedrich Nietzsche
In an Ancient Greek myth, Pallas Athena and Arachne compete to determine who can produce the most sumptuous and complex textiles. After days of hard work, the young mortal is beaten by the goddess and turns into a spider, condemned to spin for eternity. This is the relationship with Jessica Wozny, who joins this impressive line of spinners.
The artist appropriates the world when she spins, like her grandmother and certainly other women before her. She is paying tribute to a heritage charged with feeling for women who, for centuries, alone or accompanied, around a large loaf or in an atmosphere filled with tales and fables, warped and weaved, that is, created the story, joined the parts to create a fantastical whole.
The act of transferring a centuries-old artisanal skill such as weaving to a modern art setting not only implies investing or merging the powers between so-called popular and highbrow arts, but is also an extremely free, playful act. Wozny’s woven bodies are in a fragile state, threatened by the order of the outside world, since the artist’s own rules operate within a sacred space destined for play.
Her powerful desire to evoke her childhood, to map through various objects all the affection that emerged from it – in the tales by the Brothers Grimm, cartoons such as “The Last Unicorn” in the cloths created by her grandmother and mother, and in the aromatic, colorful kitchen garden of her home in Germany -, enable her to create a series of sculptures and sensitive bodies. She uses wool and plasticine, materials with inherent cultural qualities, which place her within a genealogy of references in contemporary art.