About the artist

Working with textile during the past twenty years enabled me to improve the skills I had been taught during my childhood.
I have graduated from a fashion design school in Paris, and then worked as a fashion design assistant for a couple of years in womenswear luxury houses. I launched my own high-end costume jewelry label, Olgajeanne, in 2011 after moving to Marseilles, South of France. I both designed and handmade my collections based on textile manipulations until 2020.
In 2021 I created Atelier Olgajeanne, and chose to work from now on as a textile artist.

My work focuses on interiority. We live surrounded by new technologies, and become over-exposed to information. Our urban ways of life give very little space to one’s interiority. What if we just stop, take time, and reconnect to our own emotions? Would artworks help allowing oneself a moment of interiority, and spreading out our imagination? What if cultivating a connection to oneself made it possible to live in better connection with the world?

I love textile ! I consider it as a vector of transmission, know-how and stories. I see textile as a metaphor of our bonds to other human beings: fragile, ephemeral, yet precious.
I explore the infinite potential of my favorite material; and often divert its techniques.
I deviate from the codes of perfection of craftsmanship, in favor of expression. I work from intuition, without prior drawing, from emotions and life stories.
I hand embroider abstract, subtle wall artworks in mineral tones, using simple and natural materials : cotton threads and mostly cotton fabric.
The repetition of the slow, meticulous gestures of embroidery leads me into a state close to meditation.
I favor abstraction, because it abandons the representation of reality, keeping only the essence and the emotion, freeing the imagination.

This process gives birth to artworks that I name “emotional landscapes”.

Human relationships are a one of the foundations of my work. This is why I love creating art pieces in relation with someone’s story.
I also create in situ installations, linked to the history of the places I work in.
From the small to the (extra) large scale…

Sophie Baillet