Fiber artwork is all over the place nowadays, in case you haven’t heard. And the pattern tends towards work that’s clearly labor-intensive and handmade, favoring folks traditions and pure fibers—which is hardly how any of us encounters fibers within the wild.
Giulia Crețulescu’s work stands aside for being made of fabric that’s extra acquainted: artificial cloth. She sources it from a Ford automotive manufacturing unit close to her hometown—Craiova, Romania—repurposing the stuff of low-cost seats. It’s uncommon to see such ubiquitous surfaces with no single stain. Much more impressively, Crețulescu manages to make the fabric by some means attractive.
This has so much to do with all of the straps that cling off her works, bondage-like. And the dimensions: her geometric shapes, mounted on partitions, are roughly torso measurement. The straps embrace repurposed industrial seatbelts and different appendages which are intricately handmade. With Crețulescu’s craftsmanship, it’s powerful to inform the distinction between parts discovered and fabricated.
Crețulescu lately accomplished a PhD program in graphic arts in Bucharest. Her coaching is clear within the armor-like outlines she stitches as if in bas aid. She began stitching after rising pissed off with graphic design work that, finished on a pc, “goes so quick.” Working together with her palms, she discovered “a spot to breathe.” Then, doubling down on resisting effectivity, she determined towards making something practical in any respect.
Earlier than utilizing Ford cloth, Crețulescu used pinstriped cotton, leading to abstractions extra like clothes that resemble armor-corset-suit conglomerates. They’re decidedly androgynous and exquisitely tailor-made, made of fabric she purchased as deadstock and can due to this fact by no means discover once more. That’s deliberate: Crețulescu bemoaned how garments pile up in landfills, the artificial materials resisting degradation. “I like style, however I can not carry extra garments into the world,” she mentioned once we spoke, shortly after she had returned to Romania following a formidable present at New York’s Fragment Gallery.
Giulia Crețulescu: Fuselage, ergonomics of mood, 2024.
Courtesy Fragment Gallery, New York
Rising up in an auto-industry city, Crețulescu grew to become particularly enamored of bike gear. “It’s very graphic, and really near the physique,” she famous, describing padded jackets designed to guard the spinal twine. Such options started to face out as she grappled with well being issues of her personal, prompting her to consider bike gear as modern armor. Quickly she bought into medieval armor too, fascinated by the best way it could actually summary anatomies into graphic geometries.
Crețulescu’s shapes evolve in drawings, then she makes patterns to scale. Although they’re armor-inspired, the considered executing jagged angles in steel struck her as disagreeable, sharp edges having as a lot potential to trigger damage as to forestall it.
Her course of reveals that she thinks not solely concerning the look but additionally the texture of her work. This provides her a bonus over these Minimalists who wished to make artwork that viewers have interaction with their our bodies as a lot as with their brains. Usually, they did so in shapes and supplies that had been chilly and uninviting, like steel squares. Crețulescu’s is definitively work that you just really feel in your bones.
