Artist Bio
Joëlle Collin is an artist and a designer. Her practice sits between both of these worlds. She seeks to inquire into the absurdity of our consumeristic behaviors and the underlying anxieties and desires that motivate them by questioning the nature and symbolism of objects that surround us. Working with textiles, found objects and elements foraged in nature, she is interested in altering materiality, changing physical states, and telling a different story.
Having worked in the fashion industry for many years, she is motivated by shedding light on the exploitation, extractivism and colonialism that still prevail in this industry. She is also interested in researching new sustainable materials, means of production and recycling that could affect a positive change.
Project Statement
With this piece, I want to explore and reconstruct the narrative of women and women identifying people in arts , design and crafts, changing the physical state of a classic crochet blanket that was given to me as an unfinished heirloom. By bringing my grandmother’s granny squares blanket project to completion and then transforming its soft, feminine enveloping state, into a solid piece of mid century furniture , casting it in resin to form it into the shape of a Panton chair, I wish to highlight and blur the hierarchy between the mass produced design icon of the space age era and the one of a kind work of labor, the domestic arts, the futile skills that this blanket represents.