Ruelle de Tanneurs
The Back to the tools project is based on a gardening tools catalogue dating from the 1950s, which belonged to the manufacturers Mawet frères. The company no longer exists today but at the time, it was co-directed by a grandfather the artist never knew. The unexpected discovery of this catalogue ‘with its outdated glory and lost plenitude’, the sign of every thing’s vanity in this world, aroused her curiosity in her family’s past, of which she knew nothing until then. Like a return to the source, Christine Mawet drew inspiration from this collection’s technical drawings and their strict lines to design a range of geometric abstract motifs. Floral and plant designs burst forth from the half-open secateurs, arranged in a star, spreading into infinity on a wall of the hanging gardens. In Thuin, Christine Mawet’s installation in painted steel appears like an absurd and disturbing mechanism. Attached to the wall like a stake used to support and even protect garden plants, it represents the secateurs that are generally used for trimming. These tools, used for something other than their initial purpose, appear as traces of days gone by and act as a reminder of the origin of the site hosting them.
