CHANTAL TICHIT

ARTIST BIO

Originally from the high plateau of Aubrac, France, Chantal Tichit built her artistic universe in central France, in a region known for its wildness due to its sparse population and agricultural nature. After spending two years in Patrice Vermeille's engraving studio at the Beaux-Arts in Montpellier, she set out to transcribe the graphic and organic spirit of the vast horizons of the Aubrac plateau.

In the 1990s, Chantal obtained a bachelor's degree in fine arts at Paris VIII. She began writing a master's thesis on the skin and its artistic representation. However, she decided not to pursue this research, preferring to explore her questions about the body, its containers, its contents, and its impediments visually. She then chose to focus particularly on the medium of textiles and to combine it with other materials, such as wood and paper.

Chantal regularly exhibits her work in France and abroad. In 2002, she won the jury's special mention at the Salon d'Art Contemporain de Senlis - Ile De France. In 2019, a major retrospective of her work, Fils poétiques, was organized in Bezons, Île-de-France. At the Salon Réalités Nouvelles Paris 2024, she received the Le Quotidien de l'Art magazine award.

Her works have been exhibited in France, Italy, the USA, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. They have also been featured in several publications.

She has also produced and presented works in collaboration with other artists and artisans, notably ceramicist Rose Coogan and jeweler Corinne Halliez, with whom she explores the encounter and interpenetration of materials that might be considered incompatible.


ARTIST STATEMENT

In order to unmask and counter the expectations and injunctions associated with being born a girl or a boy, Chantal Tichit stacks, assembles, and constructs worlds that play with ambiguity to engage the gaze in establishing bridges between the interior and exterior of our bodies, outside the familiar path of our formal bodily vocabulary. Textiles are one of her favorite mediums because they allow her to grasp volume in a complex way. They simultaneously lead to fullness and emptiness, hardness and softness... They can be molded, spread or constrained, contoured, included, folded... and reflect an embodied existence.

Chantal loves contrasts and combines textiles with paper and found objects, which she manipulates, paints, and shapes to create a different anatomical geography. These constructions of disparate, sometimes even contradictory elements do not detract from her search for essential visual harmony.