Elise Peroi

Rising French textile artist Elise Peroi makes liminal artworks that hover between mediums; part tapestry, part painting, and part sculpture, her delicate and intricate work brings plant forms and subtle, naturalistic colours into semi-translucent constructions that act like doorways into another realm. Exploring the airy, breathable, and mutable properties of nature, she likens herself to a landscape gardener, observing, “I’m looking for ways to translate the breath of the landscape and the landscape itself as an inhabited place.” She adds, “The foundation of my work is determined by materials from [a] garden: ‘flax, silk, wool.”

Elise Peroi

Now based in Arles, France, Peroi studied textile design at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where she completed an MFA in 2015. But her journey into art began much earlier. “From a very young age, I had the urge to create pieces that spoke of literature or poetry, interweaving the materiality of fabric with poems,” she says.

Influences came from her immediate family, as she explains, “there are two important figures in my family. The first is my mother, who’s a highly skilled seamstress. The other is my grandmother, on my father’s side, who was an illuminator and calligrapher. She worked on the Kalendrier des Bergiers, a medieval calendar printed from engraved wood.” As a young child Peroi assisted her grandmother’s work, making labels, as well as writing with a quill pen and applying gold leaf accents with a brush.

Elise Peroi

This early emphasis on time, care, and skill fed into Peroi’s practice as a student and young graduate, when weaving became central to her creative through processes. “I wanted to do everything I could to keep weaving, and my work eventually found its voice in the contemporary art field,” she explains. As a student Peroi was also drawn to the Chinese meditative martial art qi gong, and its quiet approach to containing and inhabiting space continues to inform her practice today.

Since graduating, Peroi has found her voice through incorporating subtly hued painted elements of naturalistic forms on silk, which are then playfully cut in to, and either rewoven, or left open, creating an airy, spatial quality. She works on one tapestry at a time, patiently, and mindfully, a process which can take weeks or even months, observing, “When I start weaving, I feel like I’m moving forward. I see something taking shape.” These weavings are then mounted onto wooden structures or frames, and arranged into complementary groups, resembling the ordered panels of Japanese screens. Sometimes they stand upright, or lie flat on the floor, or are suspended from the wall. In experimenting with differing arrangements, she invites viewers to move around the work, viewing it from differing angles and how it integrates with the space and light around it.

Elise Peroi

Peroi also likens the fusion of nature and structure in her practice to the integration of landscape and architecture that is so central to our lives today, for both urban and country dwellers alike. She says, “When I work on a piece of textile, I can’t help but think about architecture. A fabric, like a house, should be well made and sturdy enough. That requires an underlying architectural structure.”

Peroi also sees the act of weaving, particularly for her floor-based work, as intrinsically linked with the concept of the garden, noting, on the one hand, “I make the age-old link between garden and carpet.” But her works resemble gardens in a variety of other ways, each acting as its own private blend of order, symmetry and chaos, and each also miming the spiritual escapism and room to breathe that so many of us can find within organised green space, however big or small.