Drape and Weave, Le Pavé d’Orsay, Paris

Lauren Brincat, Julia Gutman, Gregory Hodge, Kenza Radley, Clare Thackway and Giles Thackway
3 – 13 July 2025

When memories fade or words falter, cloth provides tactile evidence: a silhouette, a scent, a shadow. Drape and Weave is an exhibition that explores this latent potential of our relationship with fabric. Bringing together works by Lauren Brincat (Sydney, Australia), Julia Gutman (Sydney, Australia), Gregory Hodge (Paris, France), Kenza Radley (Paris, France), Clare Thackway (Paris, France) and Giles Thackway (London, United Kingdom), the exhibition threads together a narrative around the materiality, influence and impact of cloth through painting, soft sculpture, installation and performance.

Brincat presents performance instruments in waiting. what holds us (selected witches), (2025) sees helium balloons floating at varied heights with streaming lengths of textiles cascading below them, like banners or flags with messages not yet defined. They’re at once responsive bodies and playful spectres in space, carrying the potential for movement, touch and communication. Hovering somewhere between set and costume, observer and messenger, the instruments hold air and time at once. Choreographed by Marina Mascarell (Artistic Director of Danish Dance Theatre) and activated by Nina Botkay (Dancer and Costume Designer), the human body interacts and guides these ephemeral thresholds. As the balloons gradually deflate, the fabric and latex pool together on the floor as the gestures return to their essential material forms.

Hanging opposite are two paintings by Clare Thackway, Milk and Venom (2024) and Not Fitting This Skin (2024). Omitting the explicit appearance of a body, which is often centred and treated as a landscape in much of her work, instead these pieces echo the presence of a figure by capturing the contours of crushed bed sheets that may have embraced one. The striped material dances and falls suggestively across the picture frame, creating folds and voids that at once conceal and reveal the symbol of a serpent. Harnessing glimmers of iconography, Thackway pulls aside the veil between reality and the unconscious realm, where ideas of transformation and renewal emanate from dye on silk.

Handwoven on a table loom, Kenza Radley’s soft sculptures honour tradition while simultaneously unravelling the rules of weaving. Translocation IX (2024) transforms along an undulating plain, where a classic warp and weft are intercepted by criss crossing threads that collapse and then gather together again. Translocation X (2024) sees this concept pushed further, where threads break away, fall down and then rise once more. Through weaving, the artist explores her personal heritage in relation to our collective experiences of identity, physically threading together and forging the meeting of these ideas.

In contrast, Giles Thackway’s Untitled (algae bloom) (2019) is a digitally woven soft sculpture that resembles a natural topographic landscape. Using a drone to film a contaminated tidal creek bed zoned for redevelopment in his local area, the artist measured and mapped its mass. Casting the depth and form of the scan in thin plastic, representing its polluted floor, a mixture of wool, elastic and viscose rayon creates an irregular surface in a neon green, denoting the slime of algae in bloom. Presenting an ecological conundrum, a relic caught between decomposition and rebirth, the work serves as a reminder of the pressure on and resilience of our surrounding ecosystems, like discarded flotsam that’s washed ashore.

Anchoring the back wall of the space is a painting by Gregory Hodge, Overture (2023). Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, his brushwork mimics the textured surface of tapestries studied at the Gobelins Manufactory Paris, more recently observing their influence on the Nabis paintings of Bonnard, Vuillard and Dennis in the Musée d’Orsay. The composition depicts dynamic ribbonus gestures that interplay with underlying patterns and recurring motifs, surrounded by a trompe l’oeil border that evokes the brustled edge of the real thing. Layering a highly complex surface with a subdued colour palette, Hodge leads the viewer through convincingly tactile moments of trickery and delight.

Working in expanded painting, piece by discarded fabric piece Julia Gutman amalgamates her textile based compositions through rigorous cutting, sewing and stitching by hand and machine. Rear Window (2025) offers an intimate self portrait, using her own likeness as a recurring mask to explore ideas of introspection and projection, the self and other. Gazing out from a window with the blinds drawn, her detailed features become fragmented and interwoven with the background of the work, sheltering the figure within a patchwork pattern. She can’t be separated from the material that renders her identifiable, from the fabric that makes up our personal and shared experiences. The work’s frame is similarly constructed with linen, leaning into the sculptural qualities of the medium.

Collectively, these works harness the possibilities of fabric as an ever present layer that exists between us and the world around us. A curtain, a veil, a threshold. Within the overlapping lines of its fibres, we can trace back the edges of time and reveal what may not have been possible before.