This year, the art world went on a high fiber diet. Abstract weavings, knotted sculptures, expressive basketry, shaggy wall hangings: all are coming out of artist’s studios and museum storerooms, lending much-needed warmth and complexity to exhibition spaces. The moment has been a long time coming. Textile, of course, is among the most ancient of human endeavors; tapestry once outranked painting in the hierarchy of the arts… textiles offer much of what the art world wants right now: under-explored histories, personal narrative, material intelligence, and demographic diversity.
How well Glenn Adamson in Art in America has threaded (couldn’t resist!) the feelings the four of us had about textile art at the Venice Biennale.
The biennale’s curator, Adriano Pedrosa, included an unprecedented number of artists working in a medium that he says has been “at times considered other or foreign, outsider or strange, in the vast larger field of visual arts.”
In fact, textile art was the first thing we saw at the biennale.
Just inside the Arsenale was Takapau, a canopy of reflective tape interwoven to resemble traditional birthing mats. Created by Mataaho Collective, four Māori women from New Zealand, it won the Golden Lion for the Best Participant in the International Exhibition.


Fully one-third of our favourites at the biennale were textile artistries, each quietly compelling.
But to our surprise, one of our hands-down favourite works of art in Venice wasn’t part of the biennale; it was one of the thirty or so exhibitions on at the same time throughout the city—and we saw it only by chance.
Just as were about to leave the Museo Fortuny, we discovered a doorway on the ground floor into a portego, a room found in civic buildings in Venice, similar to a reception hall, but with special features.
In we went to a fantastical woodland of landscapes, trees, plants, geological formations and architectural structures made of corrugated cardboard, paper, wood, plant material—and textiles: Eva Jospin’s Selva.



Selva was specifically conceived for this space. Having just seen the atelier of Mariano Fortuny, now the museum that bears his name where some of the most extraordinary fashion and design of the twentieth century was created, it was easy to recognize the aesthetic connection in the creative treatment of textiles, nature and theatrical artifice.
We were fascinated with the precise craftsmanship of Eva’s cardboard frames, especially Magellan (an engineer who considered architecture) and David (a professional framer). “I’m so fascinated by her work and the frames she created, ” David said, “gives me ideas, if I only had the time.”



How did she do this we wondered. From Wallpaper magazine,
She begins by drawing the landscapes by hand, then uses a computer program to vectorize the lines so she can move elements around and change their scale. From there, it’s a process of distilling her forms into layers, so that they can be built by stacking and glueing precisely cut sheets of corrugated cardboard. The cardboard forms are then sanded down, so the occasional sheets of coloured paper sandwiched between them peek out ‘like veins in stone’. Finally, she adds smaller decorative elements in other materials such as cork and brass.
“She and her assistants work precisely and rapidly with box cutters, multi-tools and grinders to shape the cardboard,” says Magellan who found two videos of the process from which he extracted these images: Sculpting the Dior Spring-Summer 2023 Show Set and Eva Jospin | Het Noordbrabants Museum:
For Eva, who studied architecture before switching to sculpture and thinks in layers and stratification, cardboard seems a natural choice. She told Forbes magazine,
When you use cardboard in an art piece, you will have a constant vibration that is impossible to recreate with something flat. This is really like the work of sculpture, it’s carving. If you sand it, you will erase the holes and so it’s flat and it’s like a light.
“It is in this palazzo that I found and developed my theatre of light, my sky, the impressions of my fabrics.” Mariano’s words, synchronous with Eva’s realization of Selva.
In the portals, the warm light is muted, like that in a forest as dusk approaches in late autumn. As you emerge into the vaulted spaces, ever so naturally the light brightens, as it does in a forest clearing.
When Eva was a young girl in the mid-1980s, she and a friend of hers would ride the subway in Paris, get off at a random location and find their way home, infatuated with the thrill of navigating the urban landscape—the same feeling of mystery, of childlike wonder and innocence that we felt wandering through Selva. Eva says,
The forest … is a very powerful subject when you start working on it, because it’s something that talks to everybody. You have so many myths about journeys, or finding the truth … it’s an image of the mind, an image of being lost, or finding your way.
Eva’s work is inspired by the architecture of both the Renaissance, symmetrical and well-proportioned, and the Baroque, decorative and theatrical. By patrician villas and religious buildings. By the paintings of Édouard Vuillard and the embroidery room at the Palazzo Colonna in Rome. And by eighteenth-century painters in Venice entranced by the dazzling reflections on the city’s maze of canals, (“An orange gem resting on a blue glass plate,” as Henry James described it), artists who made the city the centre of landscape painting, both realistic and whimsical.
The centrepiece of Eva’s installation is Galleria (2021-2024), an arched passageway opening to a vaulted space with a classical coffered ceiling. At seven metres long almost a life-size forest scene and made more real by the browns and textures of the cardboard and wood. Framed drawings and collages remind us of storybook landscapes.





Nymphées (2022-2024), is the homage to a three-light window that first appeared in Venetian architecture in the sixteenth century. (There’s one in Mariano’s atelier.) The window has a central arched opening enclosed on the sides by two arched niches, each containing a framed embroidery.



What’s a forest without a secret cave? Eva’s Grotte (2023) is an architectural niche bestowed with seashells and string. At the end of the portego, drawing the elements of the installation together are ink studies for two large embroideries. And an unusual addition—or so we thought until reading its history— Carmontelle (2023), an early version of the movies inspired by the transparent landscapes of the eighteenth-century painter and dramatist Louis Carrogis Carmontelle. A roll of paper stretched between two spools is attached to a crank that when turned, reveals a series of drawings engraved on canvas. (Didn’t we do something like that as kids?) Here, Eva is channeling not only Louis, but also Mariano, who designed theatre sets. Lastly, in the museum courtyard the video Forêt (2023) invites viewers to lose themselves in dark and mysterious woods.
Eva grew up in Paris, where she continues to live and work. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2002. For the last fifteen years, she has been composing meticulous forests and architectural landscapes in cardboard, bronze, embroidery or drawing. “I’m more of the type to plough the same furrow. I renew myself in repetition,” says Eva. She won the Prix de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2015 and was a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2017. Among her many international exhibitions, her work has been featured at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Chateau Versailles and in 2023, more than twenty of Eva’s works were presented at contemporary art fairs around the world. Online, David and I discovered her design work for the fashion industry, like her floral embroidery for Miss Dior perfume and The Dior Café in Bangkok.
I like these words from Fibre Arts Australia about the history and current rethinking about textiles:
Textiles have a long and memorable history and like ceramics, textiles are integrated into the history of civilisation itself. From necessity to fine art, textiles have pursued a path from providing humble warmth and protection, to plush decoration and the robes of ceremony and ritual. For years textiles languished as a collection of practical skills providing functional accoutrements. Once dismissed as ‘domestic craft,’ textiles, and the use of fibre in its various forms, are now embraced as a challenging yet accessible medium to explore cultural, environmental, political and social issues interpreted through unique and expressive gallery-welcomed artworks.”
Selva is an immersive experience, dreamlike and poetic. A reviewer suggested that Eva “brings alive the great Charles Baudelaire when he wrote:”
Nature is a temple where living pillars
Speak in half-formed whispers
We pass through forests of symbols
Which watch with knowing eyes.
In 2025 (Happy New Year everyone!), Selva will continue at the Fortuny Museum in Venice until January 13. Eva’s work will debut in North America in a solo exhibition at the Marianne Ibrahim Gallery in Chicago until January 25. Her artistry will be in the group exhibition DANCING WITH ALL: The Ecology of Empathy at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, until March 16. In Toulouse at Chapelle de La Grave, Sculpture will continue to March 30.
Us? We’re ready for more of a high-fibre diet!
Navigation
Adamson, Glenn. “2024 Was the Year of the Art World’s High Fiber Diet.” Art in America. December 12, 2024.
Chan, TF. “Artist Eva Jospin on landscapes, architecture, and her Ruinart carte blanche commission.” Wallpaper Magazine. February 10, 2023.
Cimorelli, Dario, Editor. Robert Burns, Translator. Eva Jospin SELVA. Venice: Museo di Palazzo Fortuny, 2024.
“Eva Jospin creates a magical portal in Venice.”The Spaces. April 19, 2024.
Mun-Delsalle, Y-Jean. “Eva Jospin Sculpts Enchanted Forests from Cardboard.” Forbes. December 8, 2024.
Nair, Uma. “Eva Jospin’s enchanting cardboard forests at Venice Biennale 2024.” Times of India. May 24, 2024.
Nowak, Dobrosława.“Cardboards of Shared Illusions by Eva Jospin.” Lynx. May 7, 2023.
2 Responses
WOW! Utterly fascinating – an other-world wondrous exhibition! The creative intelligence of Eva’s work is truly amazing. Thank you for the story and for the fabulous photos.
I fell in love with Fortuny textiles when we moved to a Gordon Atkins (AB architect) condo in the late 80’s. Once I discovered Fortuny fabrics – they covered many pieces of antique furniture plus there were many pillows. We all loved the silvery-gold look of the various colors – and the mystery of how the fabrics were made. We too loved the name Fortuny so we named our orange cat Fortuny – and he was my favourite of 4 different cats.
Thanks Mary Ann for sharing such an interesting story. Maybe Kerry, Kiky or David saw an explanation at the Fortuny Museum on how their iconic fabrics were made, but I didn’t; however, we plan to write a blog about Mariano so I’ll be researching that mystery…