The Archeologist’s Gaze presents and reflects on a project on the restoration of ancient tapestries, following the award of a research grant to TAMAT (Museum of Tapestry and Textile Arts, Tournai, Belgium) in 2020-2021. After immersing herself in the museum's restoration workshop, looking for images, words, materials and gestures, Paternostre turned her attention to the reverse side of the tapestry. Studying the scraps of thread that had fallen to the floor, her vision of the tapestry was turned upside down, and the little bits of thread that gradually was picked up from the ground became the focus of the research. These details bore traces of many hands that had restored and repaired the tapestry over the centuries and told a story of care and attention, the inseparable opposite of monumental tapestries and mythical tales.
The Archeologist’s Gaze
Jehanne Paternostre is a Belgian visual artist and has also recently begun teaching. She studied drawing at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles and History at the Université catholique de Louvain. Her work revolves around the fragility of memory between preservation and disappearance, and it is rooted in historical and heritage sites. She worked in forts and military cemeteries in the context of the First World War Centenary, focusing on the construction of the hero as a figure and the gestures of memorial care and maintenance before moving on to other spaces, such as a court archive and a tapestry restoration workshop. Her work is presented as installations, combining a variety of media in direct relation to the places she explores.
Visit the exposition in the database Research Catalogue.
