Silk

Marvelous fabrics, silk, draping the litter,
a thousand colours, orange, white, ochre, not a peephole in that marvellous nest,
only the rustling of the colours rippling in the air, impenetrable, lighter than nothing.

Excerpt from Silk by Alessandro Baricco, 1996, The Canons —translated by Ann Goldstein

Weaving is the art of waiting, of a slow building through the back and forth of the shuttle through the warp. The work assembles itself section by section to culminate in a final revelation.

For Elise Peroi, the craft process and its meditative aspect matter almost as much as the work born from it. Having long hesitated between painting and weaving, she found a form bringing the two together. She first paints on silk, cuts her painting into thin straps to then weave back again, playing with planes and movements. As the threads vibrate and the wood of the loom chatters, the artists lives through a mental and sensory journey. Thus, the woven work is being created in a minimal choreography to the music of repetitive sounds. This pas-de-deux executed in communion with the material also expressed itself through performances: Elise Peroi reuses her work gestures, integrating branches and marble to the threads, interweaving herself, or performing nameless rites where seeds and soil evoke the original cycle of endless new beginnings. In this way, she extends the tangible reality of the weaves.
[…]
Through the hands of Elise Peroi, Silk becomes the story of nature, so often cruel, and of the ambiguously troubling journey to beauty, to freedom, to dreaming, to desire. The story is two-fold: in parallel to storytelling through the image is expressed a strong symbolism through the material. Fragmented, decomposed, and laid out in depth, the painted images get to be transformed, distanced through an alternative temporality. Hers is a work playing with contrasts through a mesmerising material, a type of secret never to be told.