“I´m looking for my own space,” declared Magdalena Abakanowicz, the great Polish artist who brought textile art to the avant-garde in the 1960s, transcending scale and the classical materials then used in what was known in the West as “tapestry art.” Seeking her own space, finding her place, inventing other ways of inhabiting the world: this is also the goal of the works of French artist Marie Hazard. The word “space” here takes on several meanings. First, it expresses a will for affirmation: in an art world long dominated by men, where textiles were relegated to the margins of art history, it is a matter of fully occupying the field of creation. It also refers to the search for a place of emancipation—a “room of one’s own”—that weaving makes possible, taking shape as a refuge, a protective envelope, an intimate territory molded by gesture. Finally, space more literally designates what the works produce in their own materiality: a volume that is inhabited, traversed, shared. In Marie Hazard’s work, these three dimensions—political, intimate, and physical—overlap in a practice where textile becomes architecture, breath, and memory.
Weaving, for Marie Hazard, is not merely about producing a decorative surface: it is about building a place. Every stretched, knotted, twisted thread, every chosen material, every repeated gesture is a way of inhabiting space, of patiently constructing it on the loom, with the strength of arms and legs. The textile thus becomes architecture—a flexible, mobile, intimate architecture—a language of construction, a medium capable of structuring a space while letting it breathe. By questioning the autonomy of the work and its subordination to the wall, the artist embarks for the first time in this exhibition on conceptual explorations of three-dimensionality. Her pieces detach from the wall to assert themselves in space: they become panels, columns, buttresses, portals. The aim here is not to construct closed spaces, but to open, create passages, porous thresholds that invite passage. For it is in the concrete and symbolic construction of a space of one’s own, a place of freedom and creation, that Marie Hazard truly engages herself. If a place—in the anthropological sense of the term—is a point of reference for individuals, a site imbued with history and a stage for social relationships, the spaces that Marie Hazard’s works transport us to tend instead to unsettle our certainties. She proposes an entirely different experience: one of solitude, wandering, and personal introspection.
Weaving here is an embodied act. It involves the whole body: the repetition of the gesture, its rhythm, its duration become choreography. Trained in dance, Marie Hazard weaves as one composes a movement: chaining gestures like steps, in a back-and-forth between tension and relaxation, concentration and self-forgetting. The loom imposes a discipline, a frontality, but the materials escape this rigor. Paper, linen, raffia, tire inner tube, copper, silver: all these materials carry within them a memory, an origin. Some are noble, others recycled or raw, but all are reinvested, transformed. This deep interest in materials allows Marie Hazard to propose works with tactile and sensual qualities, permeable separations, neither exclusive nor restrictive, that invite one to pass through their surface and engage with matter.
Marie Hazard’s weavings are assemblages, fragments arranged like a sentence or a poem. The textile becomes a language: a language without fixed grammar, made of sensitive associations, of intimate echoes. Writing is everywhere: in the very structure of the thread, in the motifs, in the black-and-white photographs embedded in the material, in the interruptions of the weave, in the changes in materials. The text hides there and breathes, like the titles of the works, those perforated pieces that let air, light, and memories pass through. Because memory always emerges in these pieces. Memory of a gesture, of a tool, of a place, of a fragile body. Memory of a room, too—that “room of one’s own” that the artist evokes, as a protective space, a survival envelope that gradually opens to others.
Marie Perennès
Exhibition views from:
L’ombre qui tisse en moi, September 15th 2025 – January 10th 2026
Galeria Mascota, Mexico City
