Peggy Despres

Peggy Despres lives and works in Marseille (FR)

Do not be fooled by appearances.

The strange objects produced by Peggy Despres are not toys.

“I fully embrace the playful aspect of my work,” she says, “if my pieces make people smile, all the better…”

At the Fine Arts school in 1995, she began measuring her own body with a first piece, Envergure, which described the span of her arms and legs, somewhat in the style of Leonardo da Vinci. Except that her universal man is a woman, and made of fabric: “a way to reflect on form,” she says. The body stripped of its flesh, in short. She explains: “In the beginning, I always fell into a kind of pathos I couldn’t control. I wanted to talk about the body without it being present.” The following year, a female figure struggles in a video sequence with a dress with no way out, trapped in this distressing envelope. The turning point came later, by deconstructing clothes found at Emmaüs. She undoes by letting herself be guided by the lines others have sewn, never cutting. From this emerge improbable forms that no longer resemble garments but retain a trace of something dreamlike, something sensual. From them, a glossary gradually took shape, made up of dozens of strange and curiously evocative objects. The next step: reconstruction using everyday materials, like synthetic fur, which inevitably evokes something familiar.

Thus are born in her hands imaginary silhouettes, a small mutant people, modeled on the strangeness of the human form.