Take a length of raw linen and a natural resin called shellac, then work the cloth by hand from its reverse side until a dove’s wing begins to surface through the weave, and you have the method behind what Santa Gaïa Pilens calls her “contemporary mummies”.
Linen has a long history of wrapping and keeping things safe, which makes the name fitting. Pilens builds her textile murals in layers that hide and transform what lies beneath while holding on to its traces. The shellac fixes the cloth so it keeps the silhouettes and reliefs she shapes by hand, and as the narrative fades on the surface, its outline stays in the fibres. Her sources are very old: Inanna’s descent into the underworld, Salomé’s dance, and folk traditions retold until their corners wore smooth.
Freedom, by Santa Gaïa Pilens
At Art Basel Paris, the gallery ÆQUŌ presented her cycle Dance of Seven Veils, which treats the veil as both a screen and a threshold. Dance works here as a silent force behind the imagery, folding and shaping the cloth. Human and animal bodies merge, hands unfold into wings, and a dove carries the old argument between purity and desire. Pilens layered raw linen and shellac with organic fibres, and gave the cycle seven sets after seeing Tintoretto’s vast mural cycles at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice.
Above: Portrait of Santa Gaïa Pilens. Image: Atelier of Gaïa. Below: Enclosed Garden, Earth (detail), by Santa Gaïa Pilens.
For What Remains, ÆQUŌ has also unveiled an exclusive piece that Pilens made with embroidery artisans in Mumbai. Her resin-stiffened linen meets the needle there, and the gallery’s wider habit of pairing contemporary artists with traditional Indian craft gets its most textile moment. ÆQUŌ, founded in Mumbai in 2022 by Florence Louisy and Tarini Jindal Handa, builds its collaborations in the workshop, where ideas are tested against materials and the people who know them best.
Background: Dance of Seven Veils I, 2026, by Santa Gaïa Pilens. Foreground: Layered Mother of Pearl by Inderjeet Sandhu
Across the exhibition, Inderjeet Sandhu works with shell, though his method will feel familiar to anyone who sews. A Dutch designer of Indian heritage, he took up a tale from the coast near Puri, where the tide supposedly left shells in such quantities that India’s mother of pearl craft began. With shell artisans Kinkar Ghosh and his nephew Souvik Roy, who come from a village near Kolkata, he made monumental vases at an open-air workshop in central India. Shell fragments were placed one at a time and fused until the forms look grown, much as a patchwork or a darned elbow builds a surface from many small decisions.
Above: Portrait of Inderjeet Sandhu in his studio. Photo: Manan Sheth. Below: Layered Mother of Pearl by Inderjeet Sandhu
Sandhu keeps every fracture visible and every edge uneven, which is the logic of visible mending, where the repair becomes the part you look at first. The long polishing at the end draws iridescence out of dull shell, in the way a good press brings a sheen up in cloth.
Both artists start after the event, with a material that already has a history, and neither scrubs it clean. Pilens lets a story sink into linen, and Sandhu lets the sea’s damage set the pattern.
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Further Information:
What Remains runs until 24 December 2026 at ÆQUŌ’s Paris gallery, 48 rue Mazarine.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Enclosed Garden, Air, by Santa Gaïa Pilens.
All further images as credited in captions and courtesy of Aequo Gallery.