Isabella Ducrot: Stoffe

Language: ‎ English / Italian

ISBN: 9788822906724

The two hundred and fifty-two textiles in this volume make up Isabella Ducrot’s extraordinary fabric collection. The collection touches four continents—from South America to China and Japan, via France, Tunisia, Morocco, India, Pakistan, and Tibet—over a time span from the 9th to the 20th centuries. The fabrics are illustrated through detailed photographic reproductions and information essential to their understanding (areas of origin, age, size, material, weaving). These fabrics have been collected for years. Isabella Ducrot searched for them in markets, on trips, at antique shops, in department stores, on village stalls or by placing winning bids at auction, always moved by a fascination with a specialized craftsmanship whose result is not a work of art in the conventional sense: “while an individual work of art demands inventive, creative intervention from an artist, these shawls are the end-result of a collective culture in which individuals efface themselves in the name of the group. Without this productive chorus and social weave, the product suffers.”

Isabella Ducrot (Naples 1931) has for many years focused her paintings and writings on studying and pursuing her interest in the history of textiles. Her books include La matassa primordiale (nottetempo, 2008), Text on Textile (Sylph Editions, 2008), Suonno (La Conchiglia, 2012), and Fallaste corazon (Il Notes Magico, 2012). For Quodlibet, she has written The Checkered Cloth (2019), Women’s Life (2021) and Twenty-Two Places of the Soul (2022).