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Crédits photo : Delphine Dénéréaz
Living amongst the Stars of Bethlehem
Star of Bethlehem is one of the remedies in Dr Bach’s pharmacopoeia.
It is prescribed for shock, for those moments when one is left frozen in place.
Delphine Dénéréaz borrows this name from a popular, somewhat outdated pocket guide to botany to describe the textile structure she continues to build, woven from lirette: a habitable architecture where the pattern unfolds and proliferates like an invasive plant.
The hearth lies at the heart of her work. Here, a patchwork castle occupies the space: façades made of woven fragments of roses, smileys, keys and hearts. It is a refuge to be inhabited, not merely observed.
An open shelter, much like those ‘revolutions through stories’ that Goliarda Sapienza spoke of: gentle yet tenacious narratives that forge connections, offer care and provide a means of holding on.
All around, wall hangings explore the same visual vocabulary on a fragmentary scale: vases of flowers, candles, windows, words. Emblems of sentimental imagery and the 2000s, stripped of their original meaning and reimagined in a language unique to the artist.
Gentleness is never far from a touch of edge: the flowers are beautiful and toxic, soothing and invasive, remedy and poison in a single gesture.
Delphine Dénéréaz works through accumulation and repetition: an obsessive gesture that mends, patches up and brings together. The rug, once a peasant’s cloth, becomes a territory.
‘Inhabiting the Stars of Bethlehem’ is less an exhibition than a place: a woven Arcadia, mended thread by thread, where tenderness overflows to heal its surroundings.