© Sander Houthuys
Jot Fau (1987) is a multidisciplinary artist. She creates objects, sculptures, installations and photographs. She also makes clothing and costumes for art and dance performances, employing a sculptural approach. She regularly combines and integrates one or more of these disciplines in her work.
Questionning the concept of identity, of doing and becoming. Of searching and leaving on expeditions, of remaining and renewal, of departures with potentially no arriving. Jot Fau is a harlequin (1) and so is the work. The shapes in which it comes are very eclectic, nevertheless, all of it finds it's origin in that one mountain of material in which she's digging.
(1) The Harlequin, wearing their caot made out of bits and pieces is the image itself of the multiple and the multitude. The harlequin isn't part of any community,
but very slightly, they're part of every single one. - Michel Serres, Le tiers instruit, 1991.
They're broken, they still work. The title of a recent work by Jot Fau could sum up her practice in-and-of itself, as her work is about what remains, states of nostalgia and buried wounds. It possesses strenght as well as vulnerability, softness and resistance, and a soul surrounding bodies. Marked by a precarious early life, she often places fragments, sometimes tiny ones, of this intimate story in her work.
The need to create emerges from her work, as a nod to the hardships she has overcome, and, by taking care of this personal story, she increases its scope and opens it upto collective narratives. Since 2015 she has been covering everyday objects with black or grey leather: objects that marked her youth and that lost their function somehow, such as the keys to her parents' house, the shoes from her adolescence, her first watch, the lamp from her childhood bedroom, amongst other things. She reveals them all the while preserving them. And she locks up the memories, good or bad, evoked by the leather moult, in a slow ritual and a poetic and expiatory gesture. Extended to her current broken everyday objects and those of other people, this protocol, entitled Residus, is also the starting point for some of her installations.
Jot Fau covers, transforms, repairs and protects objects, gestures, images and materials. Her recent work - small wall compositions - are assemblages of elements on wooden shelves, covered with leather or fabric, whose meaning is gradually constructed through the juxtaposition of elements. Broken puppets, a small wooden house; turned upside down, dismembered toys, covered wooden branches, and a golem with a splintered head are all arranged in cocoons that are intimate universes to be explored, where embroidered quotations are to be found, complexifying the reading, and where the beauty of small things is celebrated. For example, Comment on s'en souvient ou comment on refuse de s'en souvenir (How one remembers or refuses to remember) (2021) features a leather-covered plastic dinosaur. Her godson's favourite toy before it was abandoned for being broken. This work appeals to the nostalgia of childhood, amnesiac bad faith, and the freedom to move beyond mistakes made in the past.
Beds, houses, coats, carpets and shoes populate the works of Jot Fau like traces of a domestic universe needing to be repaired. She surrounds herself with the skins of others and her own, finding fulfilment in this intermediate state, between psychological surgery and emotional self-defence. Empathetic and prolific artist, her strength is that of a survivor who celebrates life with joy and sensuality, erudition and a touch of resignation. Her works are gestures of emotional survival, life jackets or armour, through which she passes on some of her strength to others.
Coline Davenne
