Un certain désir de Silence
Un certain désir de silence was performed last September for three days in a borrowed space Rue du Temple. The exhibition places the loom at the centre of a material-driven exploration, in which furniture pieces and sculptures create the idealised setting of a room isolated from the rhythms of the outside world. A suspended space where matter and time come together to shape a shared memory, both archaic and contemporary.
The relationship between the archaic and abstraction lies at the heart of Iris Drouet’s practice. As art historian Lara Conte notes, Drouet’s research draws on the archives of artists who gravitated around the Bauhaus before moving towards the reductive painting practices of the 1960s, with references including Agnes Martin and Mira Schendel.
Through an extensive process of research and documentation, the artist translates, rewrites and transcribes different forms of language and media – from text and photography to musical scores and architecture – into solid textile objects. Her tapestries are rooted in an expressive use of raw materials: linen, ramie and fragments of antique fabrics are set against plastics, lurex, raffia and unusual objects, creating a tension between material, technique and the abstract, linear compositions of her drawings.
At the centre of this performance lies the improvisation at the loom, understood not simply as a technical tool but as an active working device, capable of creating resistance and releasing tensions that remain visible in the finished works. Through this process, Drouet explores themes of the unconscious, the archive and the archaic, understood as forms of inverted power.
Exhition and performance produced by Madeleine and Mehdi Adraa, on the 11th, 12th and 13th of September 2026. 138, rue du Temple - 75003 Paris.
Arles
Last collective exhibition at Vague, Teruhiro Yanagihara’s Studio in Arles, gathered by La Lune Galerie in May 2025, was composed of raw matter and precise, folk inspired forms. An original triptych woven out of wool and ancient bed linen, recalls for primary forms and techniques.
Primary gestures
Coming together with crafted sculptures, a collective exhibition exploring primary gestures, materials and sobriety. This series of Collective exhibitions, curated by La Lune Galerie, was named after Gary Snyder’s writings on the Practice of the Wild.
La Pratique Sauvage, November 2023 curated by Galerie La Lune.
As a background to wood and stoneware pieces, some of my wallhangings and framed works. Works I consider as pieces of a wild anatomy, highly textured by the very resistance of the constrasting materials, linen and wool as warp and weft, hand spun, woven and sewn.
Gestes premiers, February 2024, Galerie La Lune.
In the studio
Weaving is an attempt to work on the sense of 'place', both physical and emotional, embodied in textiles. Work in the studio is a practice-based one : the very handwoven process allows for a time of improvisation within the predefined draft of a piece.
I work with an extended vocabulary of signs shaped from vernacular architecture to modernist drafts. This way, the woven process may follow – as a script – a narrative of inhabited places as the referenced map for a series of tapestries. I draw and weave myself each of the piece I present here, so in a simple vocabulary I am the draftsman and the mind, the craftsman and the hand behind each woven piece I present.
Working on a woven project, visual compositions are thought through a long hand driven process, translating maps into drawings, architecture façades on scale, to a more abstract formula that fits the loom vocabulary.
Translating from paper to threads, drawings obviously take on another complexity. They discover their own materiality after days of sampling.
Sampling is an important step in the making of a piece as it embodies the first drafts, allows for improvisation to give unexpected materiality to the piece, one that unveils new paths in the making. It feels like taking a walk in a familiar landscape and discovering on the way new mindsets and views.
Iris, June 2022.
