Journey of an Artist with a Human and Singular Fiber
After multiple crossings, Claire Tingaud, a visual artist, now blends textiles, sound, and installation.
After the Baccalauréat, she entered an applied art upgrading course, then another year of preparation for the performing arts. At the end, she followed a training course preparing for the Diplôme National des Métiers d'Arts, Art Textile - weaving specialty, which she obtained with the congratulations of the jury. Finally, in 2017, she obtained a Licence Professionnelle Art-Artisanat-Design.
She has always had this appetite for textiles. La Gazette du Var met Claire Tingaud. What is your background?
Claire TINGAUD. I was lucky enough to do manual activities very early on and to meet a lot of people because being in school was not easy for me. I had to be active.
I had this urgency to leave school. After going through the book "Des métiers mon métier", in partnership with ONISEP, the profession of costume designer-scenographer was a first track. At that moment, I discovered the existence of applied arts.
I gathered information on the various existing diplomas and the path to take to move towards this type of practice.
Is movement part of you? CT. Since I was born, I have always been on the move.
My parents had a job that required moving very often. Movement and discovering new places are part of me. That is what makes me the person I am today.
In my work, in the background, this necessity and this desire to discover new places and new people quite regularly are very present. This feeds me enormously, which is why I do many residencies, and why the artistic work I carry out is situated in different territories. My work is linked to the landscapes and the encounters I make in the field.
The connection to the sensitive and the invisible and the senses on alert? CT. Through my artistic work, I try to convey an atmosphere.
In a place, I have this feeling of being permeated by all the senses: sight, hearing, smell, and the materials around me. It is like an exacerbation of the senses; everything is densified in terms of my perceptions of everything around me. I can extract these sensations to transcribe them through artistic productions.
I have a very strong connection to the touch of materials; I use textile techniques to assemble materials. In terms of scenography, the pieces I produce are suspended; it is a format that returns regularly because there is a very strong relationship to space, atmosphere, and the sensory.
With pieces woven in the Salins? CT. For four weeks, I was in the heart of the Salins.
All the materials worked with were gathered on-site, in agreement with the staff. Woven pieces were able to convey this entire atmosphere that marked me visually and sensorially. The "human work" aspect was present through the buildings, the tools—many of which were rusty, oxidized metal buried in the sand and also stored in the workshops of the workers, the salt workers who work on-site.
The "plant" aspect was present with all the plants on the site, like the canne de Provence which grows wild on the land. I made weavings with geotextile sheeting, which is used to preserve dune areas. I unwove it and recovered the black fiber.
This material made me think of the mud present in the marshes. I worked with a black and white silver print photo, which I took, of the surface of the Salins; you can see the movement of the salt on the surface. Since the photo was rewoven with other materials, you can only see matter.
This photo mixes with unbleached cotton rope and a vapor barrier.
And, texts written with the material present in the Salins? CT. I wrote a text in the Salins that I transcribed onto strips of fabric from the workshops of the Salins workers.
I soaked them with the rusty tools to patina the fabric, which helps to fix the pigments. Rust is a natural pigmentation fixer. The text was written with the mud from the Salins, with the sediments from the soil of the Salins, a very clayey black paste.
I created everything on-site, in immersion.