large sculpture dominates the living
room of Simone Pheulpin’s modest apartment west of
Paris. It is laid out on a table, its surface a riot of shapes
and textures. It boggles the mind that the entire thing –
part of a pair commissioned by clients for their new
home in the Hamptons – is made of cotton and pins.
Pheulpin put over four months of patient handiwork
into sculpting them, a real challenge despite 40 years
of experience in her craft. ‘Now I see I was capable
of doing it,’ she says, ‘and I can’t believe it.’
At age 77, Pheulpin is finally having her moment.
This year she is exhibiting in both France and the UK,
has won the Grand Prix de la Création de la Ville de
Paris and received a special mention at the Loewe Craft
Prize. As Loewe’s creative director Jonathan Anderson
says, ‘Simone transforms humble materials into
incredible sculptures. Her work is not something you
come across every day, it is a true source of inspiration.’
Major museums are also taking note: both the Art
Institute of Chicago and London’s V&A Museum have
bought some of her works for their permanent holdings.
Antonia Boström, the V&A’s director of collections,
became aware of Pheulpin’s sculptures about a year ago.
‘When you first see the work, you think it’s ceramic
or clay that’s been cut,’ she says. ‘Then, when you
understand what it’s really made of, it’s amazing.
It adds to the extraordinary wonder of the object.’
Pheulpin’s character is equally surprising – a petite
grandmother of five with a pleasant, matter-of-fact
demeanour and sly flashes of humour. Born in 1941, she
grew up in the Vosges region. Her home town produced
cotton for automobile tyres; as a child she played in
the mills among the fabric. At 17, she was turned down
to study at Nancy’s École des Beaux-Arts, so she took
evening classes, married, had children, worked as a
medical secretary and taught tennis. In her leisure time
she sewed colourful fabric panels for her children’s
rooms. One day she put the colourful fabric aside and
picked up the raw cotton lining that gave it structure.
‘I remember the first piece I did. I put little circles
in a box. But why I did that I don’t know,’ she says. She
was 35 years old. In the years since, she has perfected
her technique, always using raw cotton in the same
off-white shade. There are no preparatory sketches:
once her hands get started, it’s the material that guides
her. Repeating the same folding and pinning gestures,
she produces a startling variety of shapes from the
natural world: swirls like sheep wool, concentric circles
like cross sections of trees, fault lines. It took her ten
years to figure out how to craft a hole; these days her
goal is to recreate the cracked earth of the desert.
Pheulpin works at a small table in her flat or her
family home in the Vosges. She is on her third thimble,
having pierced two by pushing on millions of pins.
She once asked a pin manufacturer for sponsorship,
but it declined, saying that the pins were not visible in
her work. Shortly afterwards, she was having her ankle
X-rayed and thought of doing the same to a sculpture.
The result was stunning, its exposed skeleton a prickly,
swirling ballet. Now she regularly gets smaller works
scanned, and the pin maker has become a sponsor.
One of Pheulpin’s biggest pieces required 5kg of pins,
3kg of fabric and nine months of effort. It belongs to
Galila Barzilaï-Hollander, who owns four of Pheulpin’s
sculptures. ‘She reflects herself in her work,’ the art
collector says. ‘It’s very Zen, quiet, meditative, humble.’
For a long time, Pheulpin’s career was also quiet,
notably in France, where textiles have only recently
been considered a ‘noble’ art form. Pheulpin says,
‘People would see my work and say: “It’s beautiful.
Oh... it’s fabric?” And suddenly it wasn’t so beautiful
anymore.’ Things changed after she met Florence
Guillier Bernard of itinerant gallery Maison Parisienne,
who has represented her since 2008. Now, Pheulpin’s
problem is that she works nearly every day, and still
struggles to keep up with demand. When other artists
ask where she stores her unsold works, ‘I don’t dare tell
them I don’t have any’, she says with a sheepish laugh. ∂
Pheulpin’s ‘La Nature du Pli’ is at the Domaine de Chaumont-
sur-Loire, France, until 4 November, domaine-chaumont.fr.
Her work will also be on show in London at Brown’s Hotel,
with Galerie Maison Parisienne, and at PAD London, with
Galerie Gosserez (1-7 October 2018), spheulpin.free.frA
ABOVE, ENTITLED EPIPHYTE
(FROM THE BOTANICAL TERM
FOR A PLANT THAT GROWS
ON ANOTHER PLANT), THIS
ARTWORK MIXES WOOD AND
COTTON FROM PHEULPIN’S
NATIVE VOSGES REGION
LEFT, DETAIL OF PHEULPIN’S
BOUILLONEMENT, A WALL
PANEL INSPIRED BY OCEAN
FOAM, SEASHELLS AND CORAL∑ 129
Craft