Jean Gaudaire-Thor

I don't stitch pieces of fabric together, I gather some forgotten territories. This is for me a way to pay homage to the humans from the Upper Paleolithic period, or more precisely to the Magdalenian people who invented the sewing needle.

 

Although splicing, sewing, today have become ordinary practices, it is nevertheless this brilliant invention that has fostered the expansion of our own species upon the near totality of the planet. That was about 20,000 years ago. This discovery has made possible the joining of skins together, and the first weavings of vegetal or animal fibers. With this invention, the people of the Paleolithic era were able to overcome the seasons and the climatic conditions. From sedentary hunter gatherer, man became traveler, explorer of new lands and of the unknown. In the course of his migration, he went through steppes, forests, frozen lands, and oceans that would soon become roads. And slowly, very slowly, he started populating the American continent.

If for me the act of sewing takes a quasi symbolic dimension, it is because I see it as a very ancient process, something that relates to sacredness. Sewing is also perpetuating a act, an ephemeral moment of artistic creation. It is taking as a model those people who came through our region, who followed our rivers and our valleys to go beyond the place of their origin, and to conquer their fears. This perception of sacredness comes from the fact that for me, any fragment, any piece, comes from, or is part of, a coherent ensemble in which anything can have a use, and acquire a meaning. (There is surely something animistic in this approach). Then later one might pull it from this ensemble, detach it from there, cut it, defamiliarize it from the group, but it remains in its integrity. This original sacrifice may seem like a birth in which the body detaches itself forever from its genitor. Cutting, trimming, is giving birth. If surgeons often say that to cut is to heal, it also is to create new possibilities of life. Allowing these bodies/endemic fragments to extract themselves and to gather inside a new space: a pictorial space, a melting pot where everything, absolutely everything becomes possible. Since 1972, Jean has exhibited in over 180 group shows and 80 solo shows in Europe and America. His work is represented in 30 major collections and numerous private collections.