Installation view of Mending Joy by Elodie Blanchard at Julie Nester Gallery, Park City.

Walking into the airy Julie Nester Gallery in Park City right now, you’ll encounter a scene of monochromatic calm assembled from a frenzy of material play. In Mending Joy, Elodie Blanchard transforms scraps of fabric and clothing into layered tapestries, freestanding textile urns, and basketball-player-tall stuffed trees that invite viewers into a whimsical landscape of wonky trunks and purple portals. She collects material scraps and clothing to guide her process, building each piece like an artist builds a palette, the synergy between the scraps guiding the end form.

Born in Grenoble, France in 1976, Blanchard was designing clothes and putting on fashion shows in her teens before moving to Paris to study sculpture at l’École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, fashion at l’École Duperré, and eventually performance at CalArts. She now lives in Brooklyn, teaching at Parson’s School of Design and shows her work across the country and abroad. Blanchard had early fashion success, selling her eponymous clothing line at La Redoute in France. She went on to establish her own design studio in 2005 specializing in textile design and fabrication, from anything like large-scale custom draperies to site-specific installations, soft furniture and home accessories. Blanchard has even collaborated with architects to bring textiles beyond our bodies and windows to our built environments.

Blanchard’s personal practice grows directly from these professional pursuits. The scraps left behind in textile production become the raw material for her ethereal, Dr. Seuss–like sweater forests, frenetic tapestries, and regal urns. Using her technical mastery as a starting point for play, she sketches with thread and paints with fabric that might otherwise end up in a landfill, giving discarded materials a new epilogue. In this way, Blanchard constructs what she calls “an alternative universe of all the stuff not needed in our society of overconsumption.”

Each of Blanchard’s trees is distinct yet connected to the others. Constructed from Poly-fil, metal rods, concrete, and fabric sourced from her own and her loved ones’ closets, they stand like a small community of characters. Each tree bears the name of someone special in the artist’s life—Louise, Rio, Rox—its layered textiles embodying individuality while remaining rooted in the collective presence of the forest.

Elodie Blanchard, “Lavender Lake,” found textile, leather, 40×55 in.

The surrounding tapestries create windows into different scenes to peer into from the safety of our enchanted forest. “Black Silver Sun” feels like an agrarian scene. Emerging from black night, the sun rises over the green-striped pastures—an intentional moment of straight lines—and reflects off dew particles making for an iridescent sunray to open the day. “Purple Portal” lures us into the velveteen abyss with its cheetah glimpses and shiny pink collar. “Lavender Lake” again uses the calming repetition of a quilt stitch around the lavender palette to set a tranquil tone on the shores of a flat-plane lagoon, the droplets rippling outward in fleeting procession.

Several works incorporate crinkled metallic fabric whose iridescent surfaces are traced with neon thread that vibrates against the monochrome palette. “Red Play” pairs the metallic material with a Betty Boop red of an almost cochineal intensity, while neon pink stitching winds through the folds like seams running through a canyon. Her stitches vary in the piece: a grid stitch secures a patch of suede, while a piece of lace is attached with a back-and-forth motion reminiscent of mending worn work pants.

Elodie Blanchard, “Urn 19 Blue,” fabric, leather, mylar balloon, 16x12x11 in.

As the name of the show would suggest, Blanchard uses mending techniques of backing and attaching and close striations of stitches to bring a structural integrity to the pieces. She uses both machine sewing and hand sewing. The former creates the frenetic energy of sketching lines and attaching things securely while the latter brings humanity and craft into the practice. The urns, constructed in panels and stitched together by hand, accumulate so many layers of fabric and thread that they stand upright on their own. Blanchard’s access to industrial-grade supplies allows for niche materials to appear in her work—like the thick metallic silver cord she hand stitches to close the seams of “Urn 19 Blue.” The stitching is painterly, creating swirling movement reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, as navy threads gather into swirls and bubbles like the wind wrapping through a night sky.

These pieces rarely lie flat. Blanchard intentionally sews in gaps, bumps, and stuffed sections—choices that might be considered faux pas in the trade—to create topographical tapestries that ripple across the “landscape” in a work like “White Topography.” Elsewhere, her “bouquet” compositions resemble arrangements of tropical flora from a Costa Rican jungle, their feathery forms suggesting the tail plumes of macaws hanging from branches.

Blanchard’s practice shifts attention away from the authority of retail art supplies and back toward the imagination. Realizing an afterlife for materials, Mending Joy is a testament to the power of play. Blanchard does not let her deep professional experience in textile design stymy her sense of play as she fabricates an enchanted, immersive universe for the viewer.

Elodie Blanchard, “Bouquet 75,” found textile, leather, 25×25 in.

Mending Joy, Julie Nester Gallery, Park City, through Mar. 20

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.