Exeko coaches Marie-Hélène Loisel in the development of her artistical project "Women's bed".

Biographical notes

Marie-Hélène Loisel arrived in Montreal in 2001 where she has strengthened her artistic abilities. She has been an accomplished artist for over twenty years in traditional and contemporary textile arts.
Her latest work, Women’s beds, comes from personal thoughts on women’s intimacy, but also from relational textile experiences throughout the world that she initiated or that naturally came from a simple meeting. While working on the symbolic of Christmas celebrations (Christmas’ Etiquette, 2006), or textile murals inspired from Klimt (The Downfall of Religions, 2006 – 2009) or Native ceremonies (Ceremonies, 2005), she never stopped meeting women worldwide, from India to rural women in Touraine (France), while organizing sewing workshops in the streets of Cairo and Senegal (Heart to Heart Project).
Is there any encounter more natural than the daily ones?

Women’s beds

Women’s beds is a piece made of five different parts, each of them accumulating a multitude of fragments of fabrics or other elements.

Women’s fabrics. And also men’s. Especially women’s!
Fabrics passed on between generations, trousseaux from women of the past.
Fabrics given by strangers touched by the emotion coming from this name: Women’s beds.
Fabrics in movement, picked up on the street or brought back from trips abroad.
Women’s beds tell women’s lives, from birth to death.

A position

The idea of progression, both visual and symbolic, is key in Women’s beds, moving toward drama and what is unacceptable, while staying delicate. This progression, in time, experience, violence, and perception, creates a new image of the universal woman.
Each fragment represents an event in women’s lives, symbolized by red fabrics for violence and poured blood, white fabrics, black fabrics for mourning, or feathers for children who left too soon. The accumulation of violence laying in each of us is depicted through a subtle colour variation. By the simple fact of telling these lives, the artist speaks for many silent women, as if she was taking over, so that every single woman could get rid of their inner violence. Despite that, Women’s beds is also about peace, talks about femininity, always with delicacy. White always dominates red and black as hope remains.
This work is an accumulation of every women so that they define themselves. As if she wanted to end with the “I am a woman and I bleed” taboo, a red thread links all the parts together and makes it coherent. This thread is a symbol of the menstrual cycle, and marks time as an ability to give birth but also as a sign of femininity. Blood transforms the girl into a woman, but also symbolizes a normality: women’s intimacy.
Women’s beds is for « women’s blood who died without a dream » (Léo Ferré, À toi), for every women whose essence was and still is survival.