ARTIST VICTOR SIRET
Our team spends a lot of time working on discovering talent that really stands out and catches our attention. One such discovery is today’s feature because we are obsessed with the cross stitch textile embroidery mixed with familiar environments and cynical commentary of the times.
The artist ( b. 1998) in Saint-Herblain, France works with embroidered textiles to create meticulously crafted artworks - inspired by a discipline that was passed on to him from his grandmother as a teen. Victor studied at both Beaux-Arts School in Nantes and in Annecy.
Tell us about your greatest inspirations or influences please.
I am influenced by television from my childhood and adolescence, ranging from old cartoons to soap operas and B movies to auteur cinema, and fragments of American popular culture from the 50’s to the present day.
I’m also interested by the atomic age and 9/11.
I have a particular appeal for architecture, ornamentation, and skyscrapers. The postmodern movement fascinates me. Besides that, i’m often working on living spaces such as suburbs and offices.
How are the current trends in technology and innovation affecting your work as a creative?
New technologies do not necessarily intervene during the making of my pieces. However I can say the internet allows me to create an important iconographic bank that helps me during the preparatory drawing phase.
We’d love to hear more about your creative process.
I start by assembling pieces of drawings from my notebooks, and then I begin to design and draw, with colored pencils, a fragmented landscape, composed of shapes of my own, and elements collected from pop culture, cartoons, video games, architecture… The preparatory drawing isn’t the final form yet ; I still have to transpose a pencil sketch of the drawing onto my canvas. I also spend some time choosing the different colors of the threads I’ll use, and then I arm myself with my needle and I’m off for many hours of work. I’m not just filling the sketch, some shapes don’t suit me anymore, or sometimes some colors don’t fit together, so I undo the embroidery and try to find something else. When the embroidery phase is finished, I have to design a frame and stretch the canvas over it.
Anything coming up that we should know about?
No big events for the moment, I continue to produce pieces in my workshop. I plan on making much larger pieces and work on installations with sounds, videos, and volume while keeping a deep attachment to the textile work.
What does wellbeing mean to you and anything in particular that you practice?
I have to really take care of my eyes because I do 7/8h of embroidery in a day, every 20 min I have to take a break of 20s to rest my eyes, and I also do some exercises for my wrists.
