This post was originally published on artnews.com
To communicate beyond the word, beyond “the disastrously explicit medium of language,” per James Baldwin: This is Marie Hazard’s obsession.
Hazard is a weaver, and we converse well. Yet words are hard for her. She is dyslexic. She wishes she could write. Writing, she says, is “difficult to next to impossible” for her. But recall: “text” came into French from the Medieval Latin texere, meaning “to weave.” In earlier Latin, textus meant “a woven thing.”
Hazard was born in Le Havre, a city for which she bears little nostalgia. “I had a complicated childhood and questioned myself a lot,” she tells me in her Parisian studio. “My greatest desire was to acquire my freedom, my independence.” And so, she developed her voice in a suite of elsewheres: London (where she learned to weave at Central Saint Martins), then São Paulo, New York, and Mexico City. She read a lot: “an inexhaustible source.” We talk much of Marguerite Duras and of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, which took a central role in her breakthrough exhibition, in 2021, at Galerie Mitterrand in Paris.
This is how Hazard works: first, she draws. She leans toward spirals, jagged forms, and splashes of color that are part Mark Rothko, part Jacques Demy. Then she weaves from this drawn plan. She listens to music or perhaps a podcast while working at the loom. “It’s all about listening. How my body moves. I tell stories. I think weaving is my own language, an action to transcribe my thoughts, my stories, my messages.” Her colors are spring-fresh, but can lean broody, play-around. Sometimes, she prints photographs—Brazilian street scenes, a Lakers jersey, selfies—upon her woven texts. Perhaps it’s a way to stretch time, to delay the oblivion of forgetting.
In early cinema, the process of editing one shot next to another to create the third meaning was dubbed not montage, but conversation. And Hazard, who was touched early by weavers like Sheila Hicks but is currently more animated by books and music and movies, always uses her pieces to converse. She tells me about a special motif in her work: the spiral. Paris, which I get the sense has never quite felt like home for her, is built around the concept of the spiral. As she puts it in an interview in her debut monograph, put out by Zolo Press in 2022: “I began working with spirals because I was feeling like one. I was really asking myself: Where should I place myself? … I feel much better not being in the center. The edge gives me a certain clarity.” The whole point, as I take it, is for the artist to get lost in her own work. The self gets effaced and re-created in so many cross hatches, small threads, and hypnotic patterns.
Hazard is not unaware of the sudden institutional interest in the practice of weaving, historically dismissed. The Met just staged a comprehensive exhibition putting 20th-century weavers (Anni Albers, Lenore Tawney, Olga de Amaral) together with ancient Andean artists spanning the first millennium BCE to the 16th century. Tate and MoMA PS1 have mounted retrospectives of Albers and the fourth-generation Navajo weaver Melissa Cody, respectively. As Hazard slyly notes, “weaving is taking off.” It is a loud moment. Both in its creation and its reception, the craft inspires introspection, in an age where that’s in short supply. There is a hushed force to her works. You don’t consciously feel them working on you when you first encounter them, but afterward, on the subway or in the park, there they are, unfolding in front of you. Like a photograph you can hold.