Of metal and silk
Text by Aby Gaye-Duparc
Curator, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
“Women have always collected things and saved and recycled them, because leftovers
yielded nourishment in new forms.” Miriam Schapiro
Kwama Frigaux's works form intricate constellations, rich in color and meaning, made from small fragments of daily life. Echoing the quilts and assemblages of Betye Saar and Annette Messager, her compositions reflect both intimate and societal portraits, engaging with themes of memory, care, and vulnerability. Behind these luminous installations lies a long, meticulous process of collecting, sort ing, and cleaning materials—medicine blisters, plastic bottles, shards of glass.
Her practice blurs the line between fine and decorative arts, evoking textiles, jewelry, and stained glass. Though seemingly non-functional, her large metallic drapes made of pill blisters can be shaped to suit their environment, transforming space. This connection to textiles is not only formal, but also procedural: collect ing demands slowness, rigor, repetition, and bodily engagement—like weaving. A lover of Byzantine mosaics and medieval stained glass, Frigaux weaves a play of light, transparency, and color into each piece. When observed closely, these luminous fragments form grid-like texts, offering a language of their own—a visual writing through reassembled fragments.
Frigaux pays deep attention to overlooked remnants. Once collected, the materials are cut, sewn, woven, embroidered, painted, and assembled into new constellations. Collecting becomes a political act—preserving and repairing memory. This is especially evident in her recent pieces, which take the form of protective objects: a silk duvet and cushions filled with pill blister residues. Yet the softness of silk hides a fragile balance, seemingly pierced by the metallic shards within.
During a recent research stay at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, Frigaux explored ancestral materials—part icularly beads crafted from fragments of colored glass bottles. Inheritors of centuries-old t rade across West and North Africa, these Ghanaian glass beads open new paths of reflection on the historic and economic dimensions of materials, inaugurating a new chapter in her practice. At KNUST, where the art department encourages experimental and gift-based creation, artists challenge the market-based value of materials—an ethos fully aligned with Frigaux's vision.
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Ritika Biswas, curator - On Pharmaco-Poetics, Ecologies, and Spectrality, 2024
“We sit within the works of Kwama Frigaux— these tapestry-sculptures, shiny ghostly beings are created out of empty medicine blisters she collects from hospitals, pharmacies, old age homes, friends, lovers. She assembles their pains, highs, and desires catalysed by these plastic packs, she peels the aluminium and paints the emptiness where the pills once sat, she traces the spectral gestures of their fingers which once popped out these pills, and traces of the chemicals that once entered their bloodstream still stain these sculptures. Some, when viewed from the front, evoke the stained glass of churches and other religious architecture, superstructures which are akin to hospitals and pharmacies in their own right. The stain is not static, medicinal traces circulate in the air and the molecular economies in which we are all implicit.
These works, viewed from the ‘back'; become text— text as and of traces, traces as stains, traces as transmogrification; transformation that is biochemical, corporeal, pharmaceutical, political, sometimes even metaphysical. These texts spew the repetitive obfuscated semiotics designed to keep us out of its grammar, names we can hardly pronounce even though we trust our lives and bodies with them; these words that are synthesised horse, ox, and rabbit blood. This odd discrepancy mirrors the way we rely on structures, grammars, assurances prescribed to us which guide and control our existence, or at the very least, promise to take the edge of it.”