Texere Memoria | Annie France Noël

L'Ambiance | Friday, July 31- Sunday, August 2 | 12-7pm

Struts Gallery

Annie France Noël will create a hybrid space where installation, performance, and encounters with the public co-exist in relation to her work with sheep’s wool and its various stages of transformation (from raw fleece to weavable thread). This project extends from a body of transdisciplinary works rooted in the traditional folk song «La laine des moutons» (The Wool of the Sheep), which she interprets as an allegory for ruminations on parenthood as performance and on the body as archive; a site of embodied memory carried through touch, repetition, and care. The actions of transforming wool (shearing, skirting, cleaning, picking, brushing, spinning, weaving, wearing, singing…) evoke the complexity of human relationships and the humility required to tend to them. 

The public is invited to join Annie France in an intimate nook made of raw sheep fleeces where she’ll tend to various techniques of transformation. Folks may witness and/or take part. Through the shared labour, conversations and exchanges around the themes explored are encouraged. 

[Practical information: the wool carries a certain earthy, musky odour, but is typically not overwhelming in a somewhat open space. Wool allergy is rare and is triggered from cutaneous contact with the natural oil (lanolin) contained in untreated wool. While the song is French, Annie France is fully bilingual and can interact in both French and English.] 

Annie France Noël is a visual artist, photographer, educator and cultural worker. Her practice lies at the intersection of the invisible and the inexpressible, where she critically addresses realities that are often concealed. Since entering matrescence, she has developed a self-theoretical and transdisciplinary practice involving photography, video performance, craft processes and installation, in which parenthood becomes one anchor point among others for exploring memory, transmission and bodily experience. Annie France lives, mothers and creates on unceded Mi'kma'ki territory (Moncton, NB).