A Beautiful Mindset : Séverine Gallardo
From badges to jewels, stones to totems, and headdresses to arm adornments, the sky’s the limit for Séverine Gallardo’s marvellous imagination. This self-taught French textile artist’s stitches speak well beyond what meets the eye.
With her creativity in the clouds but her studio firmly rooted in Angoulême, southwestern France, Gallardo makes extraordinary soft sculptures that trace a magical journey across the globe. With a nod or a spin, she sweeps us away to faraway countries, cultures, and moments in time while encouraging us to slow down and cultivate an almost childlike sense of wonder for everyday life. As all the minute details show, a keen method in Gallardo’s madness produces a playful, intriguing, and unique narrative.
Gallardo has always enjoyed immersing herself in her artistic endeavours. As a child, she would isolate herself to make things: draw quietly while her parents watched TV; she was happy in their presence but focused on her activity. She owes her passion for textiles to her two grandmothers and recalls how one of them taught her how to crochet when she was bored on vacation. “The pleasure of the repetitive gesture, the contact with the soft material of the thread, has never left me,” she says.
Perhaps surprisingly, when it came to higher education, Gallardo chose Multimedia Studies at Les Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts) School in Marseille. Textiles were not regarded very highly in France at the time, primarily associated with materials and manual work. Nonetheless, she pursued her needlework in parallel with fine art. She recognised that these studies sparked a desire to experiment and cultivate herself to give direction and substance to her practice.
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With her creativity in the clouds but her studio firmly rooted in Angoulême, southwestern France, Gallardo makes extraordinary soft sculptures that trace a magical journey across the globe. With a nod or a spin, she sweeps us away to faraway countries, cultures, and moments in time while encouraging us to slow down and cultivate an almost childlike sense of wonder for everyday life. As all the minute details show, a keen method in Gallardo’s madness produces a playful, intriguing, and unique narrative.
Gallardo has always enjoyed immersing herself in her artistic endeavours. As a child, she would isolate herself to make things: draw quietly while her parents watched TV; she was happy in their presence but focused on her activity. She owes her passion for textiles to her two grandmothers and recalls how one of them taught her how to crochet when she was bored on vacation. “The pleasure of the repetitive gesture, the contact with the soft material of the thread, has never left me,” she says.
Perhaps surprisingly, when it came to higher education, Gallardo chose Multimedia Studies at Les Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts) School in Marseille. Textiles were not regarded very highly in France at the time, primarily associated with materials and manual work. Nonetheless, she pursued her needlework in parallel with fine art. She recognised that these studies sparked a desire to experiment and cultivate herself to give direction and substance to her practice.
Want to read more of this article?
We are proud to be a subscriber-funded publication with members in 185 countries. We know our readership is passionate about textiles, so we invite you to help us preserve and promote the stories, memories, and histories that fabric holds. Your support allows us to publish our magazine, and also ‘what's on’ information, and subscription interviews, reviews, and long-read articles in our online blog.
ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? CLICK HERE TO ACCESS CONTENT
OR...to continue reading….
*Magazine subscribers automatically get free access to all our online content. We send the access code by email with the publication of each issue. You will also find it on the envelope containing your magazine. Please note the access code changes every issue.*