Silvana Mc Nulty
Le vide en main
07.02 — 03.05.2026
Le 19, CRAC, Montbéliard
«Something bright with holes
—that is how a young girl, having regained her sight, once
described a hand. (1)»
Le vide en main conveys, in just a few words, the artistic practice of Silvana Mc Nulty. She continuously generates hybrid, flexible, and unstable entities based on principles of assemblage and the repurposing of objects, combined with or through textiles.
The hand is that of the artist herself, moving with her tools, her ball of yarn, and her crochet hook each day, working in the places she passes through with a constant sense of freedom.
The void is what appears in the knots of the stitches, the perforations of objects, and the gaps left for those who look, as they attempt to resolve certain enigmas deliberately set by the works. Indeed, these works are constructed from oxymorons and paradoxes that shape our world. Whether through a subversive alliance of objects and materials that are, a priori, incompatible, or through a tentative appropriation of space, they explore zones of friction between rigidity and flexibility, interior and exterior, fragility and resistance, transparency and opacity, the visible and the invisible, or perhaps even the useful and the beautiful.
Trained in jewelry-making before pursuing a course of study in visual arts, Silvana Mc Nulty's work is grounded in a practice of hybridization—of media, objects, and materials—brought about through a form of cooperation or attentive listening to their enigmatic voices. When the artist employs shells, protractors, spoons, and paper clips in her sculptures, this cooperation takes the form of misuse or subversion. Like an oracle, it then reveals other qualities and properties of things, “making them more alive” by playing with the possibilities generated by the oblique strategies intrinsic to assemblage.
The repetition of forms, gestures, and the choice of materials and objects generates assemblages that carry their own narratives; yet, when considered as a corpus, they can be understood as the words composing the lexicon of a foreign language. The works thus constitute as many frameworks that can be unfolded or folded back, in which everyday materials, gestures, and fragmented narratives intertwine, sometimes addressing another space-time.
«Rental of time
on the metaphysical void
says Space (2)»
- Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes, Éditions du Sous-Sol, 2024..
- Hessie, Boîtes, exhibition catalogue, Paris, ARC 2, Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Rennes, Maison de la Culture de Rennes, 1976..