We’re currently in your studio in Paris where you are preparing new works to be shown with Ginny on Frederick at Art Basel in June. There is a genealogy inherent to these pieces, namely, the materials and images that accompany them, that effectively structures your whole practice in recent years. You use a particular type of floral-printed tablecloth sourced in New York City dollar stores, so there’s a geographic and economic dimension to this material. When did it first appear in your practice, and why has it become such an indispensable part of it?

I started this body of work five or six years ago. At first, I was simply collecting tablecloths I bought in dollar stores and used them to cover my worktables. At the time, I was working on another series using the same rubber these works are made from.

By accident in the studio, I started to see the potential in printing both the embossing and the colour of these tablecloths. I’m drawn to finding materials associated with low or pop culture: something cheap, mass-produced or domestic that would be a kind of synthetic, simulated version of the so-called “real thing.”

I’ve now worked with two different patterns—one for the Dolly series and one for the All for You series.

For Basel, I’ve decided to develop the process further and keep the work moving by adding a screenprinted layer, which consists of a reproduction of the image printed directly into the tablecloth before casting it. It becomes a copy of a copy, testing the limits of repetition and how far that transformation can be pushed. I was also interested in introducing another medium into the process to see where it would lead me. What is emerging now feels like a memory of the image—something that is fading, almost ghostly.

The memory of the image as the memory of the original source material is equally felt in works where you are just using rubber, although in the new works you’ve introduced screenprinting into the process. The result is that the tension between loss and presence, memory and disappearance, becomes particularly palpable. Considering that your practice is inherently process-based, how do you feel this recent evolution is present both during the moment of creation and in the final work?

Until now all the colours came directly from the tablecloths themselves. I didn’t add anything else. It was a direct transfer until I exhausted the tablecloth. The mould was then cut, reassembled, and became a collage in a circle of creation and destruction.

The multiple copies of the original lead to a gradual loss and fading of the source image that ultimately becomes inaccessible.

For the new ones I am making now,  I am screenprinting into the tablecloth. So, again, the image is a copy of copy and seems to become a looser, fading memory of it. Bringing casting and screenprinting together becomes, of course, very tautological, but it allows me to distort and play with the resolution of the image even further.

You are facing a two-dimensional work that comes from a sculptural process. Up close you can see the folds and materiality, which confuses what it actually is: an image, a print, a painting, or something altogether different.

Chance is also an important factor in the process, in how I can bring all these events together.

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I’m curious about your approach to this diversity of media: screenprinting, rubber casting... You’re forced to work horizontally in a very physical process that demands your body to move in a certain way, there’s a choreography at play here. And of course, once you hang them on the wall, vertically, that changes their status as well. Collage, assemblage, painting, photography, all these different medium references coming in all at once. How do you consider them ultimately?

‍Because they seem to be so many different things at once, I simply call them "works." People tend to refer to them as paintings, mainly because they hang on a wall and present an image, but I'm interested in resisting fixed definitions and escaping clear categorisations. I tend to view them as screens, in the same way that we now view the world—and the world of images—through the small screens of our phones.

I want to pick up on what you’ve just said about screens, as these works are inherently photographic, even cinematic, in the way that the sequential nature of the flower image becomes akin to the stop-and-start of a movie frame. It also brings to mind the early experiments and photographic studies of motion made by Eadweard Muybridge in the 19th century. Coming back to you, this seriality is upgraded to its 21st century variant—the meme—which you explored already in the exhibition project Dolly (2021-2022) held at Etablissement d’en face in Brussels. As the title suggests, the star of the show was Dolly Parton.

When I made this exhibition, I wanted to find an idea or something that could bring together opposites and I was looking for an unifying figure, someone who can bring people together, at least for a moment, and that’s how Dolly Parton came up. Everyone loves Dolly! I was interested in the idea of an uber kitsch, over-the-top persona. She’s contemporary while also representing something very nostalgic.

One morning, on my way to the studio, I found a small paper clip from a newspaper of Dolly Parton (or at least someone who looks like her). For the show I wheatpasted 25 images directly on the wall, like a film still. I also used sodium lights, which cast an intense yellow glow throughout the entire space, but more importantly, they flatten the colour of everything and become kind of grey.

Whereas Muybridge depicts the development of a movement, here it’s a still image that is endlessly repeated—a movement that stands still, in a way, something like a glitch. I’m interested in how an image becomes detached from its original context: a process akin to a meme, something that mutates through repetition, but at the same time flattens meaning. Dolly is about reproduction. The first cloned sheep was named after Dolly. All the works in the show were named Dolly.

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Is the feminine aspect of these works a conscious, willed decision on your part? How much space does this take up in your thinking?

It’s funny because they’re almost over-the-top, to the point of ugliness, and then they shift into something cold and strangely beautiful. It can swing or go wrong very quickly. I wanted to use the flower motif to confuse and unsettle that femininity, even the sentimentali to ty that comes with it. I think the distance and coldness I’m interested in also comes from an early attraction to Minimal and Conceptual art. That’s where a lot of my thinking around restraint and form started.

The seriality of the images could also be attributed to a mode of thinking and making that has its roots in Minimalism. At the same time, your work shares attributes with Minimalism’s opposite, Pattern and Decoration, which, from the 1980s, came to be dismissed by critics because of its unashamed sensuality. For me, you’re conversing with these two radically opposed movements not to necessarily create a clash but to find points of convergence.

Yes, I am interested in how to bring contradictions together, the friction between the two.

The formal reduction versus a more affective or decorative language. I think the work moves back and forth, or holds them together.

The image from the tablecloth is a reproduction of a flower, not the real thing, but a copy. I am trying to find motifs (here, flowers or cats) that are easily recognisable and can trigger a multitude of associations, imageries, symbols or even clichés, without necessarily having one clear intent or definition.

The seriality of the images is also closely tied to casting as it contains a logic of repetition. I’m interested in that in-between space where seriality is never fully neutral or mechanical.

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You’re playing with the status and value of the object and image. We mentioned earlier how one tends to read a work differently based on whether it’s hanging on a wall or lying prostrate on the ground. However, repetition tends to distill meaning, turning it into something else entirely, perhaps to the point where meaning cedes to form.

I’m not sure what the image becomes through repetition, but I think it starts to mimic the act of scrolling where we no longer really see what is right in front of us. We forget how to look. There’s a kind of loss there. When you encounter my works in person, they don’t look anything like they do as flat images. They have texture, depth, and a physical presence.

I’m interested in understanding the capacity of a medium and how far I can push its limits. An early work, Seventy Seven Seconds (2012), explores a similar idea using two slide projectors placed next to each other. They continuously search for their focal point, only momentarily aligning every 77 seconds. For a brief instant, they achieve the same size and produce a pure rectangle of white light.

Are you obsessive?

I’m a very obsessive person! But only because I keep finding new layers to zoom in, stretch, and explore. In that sense, I could say that my practice is quite fetishistic. The flower motif gets reduced, displaced, abstracted, ghosted, or erased. The works stutter, they repeat, but they’re never exactly the same. For me, sculpture is often a dead process: you make a mould and then a cast, which becomes its exact replica. I wanted to find a way to bring sculpture and cast-making back to life, with higher chances of accidents.

One last point worth mentioning, I think, is that temporality is highly present in your work. You enact a deceleration through the physical labour that these pieces require, but you also preserve a source material that is cheap, flimsy, and highly disposable, and anchor it in the present.

Maybe I am trying to slow down time, or at least create a counterbalance to the speed at which we consume images and live life. In an early video work, L’espace d’une année en une minute (2010), I filmed the pages of a calendar flipping by, compressing an entire year into a single minute. The older you get, the faster time goes by. I guess my practice has gradually become a way of resisting that acceleration.

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Sophie Giraux (b 1984) lives and works in New York and Paris.

Anya Harrison is a curator and writer based in Montpellier, France. Her writing appears regularly in magazines (Flash Art International, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Numéro art, Arcane), exhibition catalogues and other publications.

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