Cyril Maisonnave

My passion for knitting began while training in a workshop overflowing with multicolored spools of various textures designed for the garment industry. Knitting became the textile specialization allowing me to create my own material from threads and needles or from the machine.

My research axes, often linked to artistic projects, are oriented towards the experimentation of particular materials and are often not visualized in the world of knitting. This allows me to create singular materials, textures that I link to universes, to words, to sensations.

The collaboration with artists mastering other techniques, which are not at first sight associable with knitting, allows, in the mix of techniques, to emerge creations that renew the approach that we have or that we think to have to "knitting".

The visit to the museum of popular arts in Laduz, founded by Raymond Humbert, was the revelation of my approach, inspired by an acquaintance, collector, of wooden spoons.

Each piece of the collection makes you travel geographically but also temporally. Each object, classified by type of craft or by stage of life, is charged with an emotion resulting from a manual tradition, transmitted from generation to generation. It is the exception in everyday life. Our lifestyles, consumerism, disposability, and obsolescence have pushed our generations to renew even everyday objects to excess.

Cutlery, which so regularly shares our daily lives, is one of them. Through industrialized mass production, they have lost their evocative power, their history, and are now thrown away, whereas in previous lifestyles, they were used for a long time. They were even associated with key stages of our lives.

Based on the know-how of knitting, which has always succeeded in passing through time and fashion phenomena, my cutlery, through its treatment, speaks to us of its discarding, of its erasure. As an observer of our contemporary world, their metamorphosis, their assimilation to the natural environment from which their materials come, leads us to a poetic reflection on ourselves.