MAI-THU PERRET

They are free from the restraints the rest of us know. There are no wages, bosses or gender hierarchy – just liberated women doing what they want. To date, their output has included glazed ceramic tiles, neon works, films, wallpaper, abstract geometric paintings, a walk-in giant teapot, fabric banners and radical writing. 

Okay, so this commune is actually the brainchild of artist Mai-Thu Perret, who has been developing work through this fictional foil since the late 1990s. Her art is a hall of mirrors – actual, often-hand-realised objects that are also fictions born of fictions. Yet it has very real-world concerns. Often riffing on the overlooked achievements of great women artists from the past, she resurrects modernism’s utopian dreams and looks to art’s social, transformative potential. 

Your presentation at this year’s Venice biennale included a recreation of Elsa Schiaparelli’s iconic skeleton dress. Schiaparelli was famously uncompromising, a businesswoman, artist and designer in a time when few women worked, let alone ran their own fashion empires. Why this dress in particular?

“The dress is a collaboration with Salvador Dali, from the 1938 Circus Collection. It’s interesting in so many different ways: as a surrealist artefact, as a very haunting object, but also as an emblem of the kind of collaborations that Schiaparelli pursued with artists of the avant-garde all of her life. For example, she was one of the organisers of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in New York in 1942, where Duchamp created his seminal Mile of String installation. Here is a female figure at the centre of the artistic innovations of her time, and yet today she is much less famous than her male colleagues, probably also because she was a fashion designer, a trade that is not considered as important. The replica I used in Venice was first used as a costume for a short film I made last year, and what I liked about the dress was that it is an artefact that seems to have a life of its own. The film was written around the prop; it was the thing that gave it life.”  

You studied English Literature rather than go down the usual art-school path, but said you were inspired by the artists you grew up around in Geneva. What did you learn from their experiences?

“There were a lot of squats and artist-run spaces in Geneva at the time; it was really inspiring. What I liked was that these people would get together and organise events – they didn’t seem to be waiting for a museum or a gallery. The boundary between art and life was quite blurry. It was as much about the scene and the community as it was about the art itself.” 

What are the commune working on at the moment?

“At the moment they are very inspired by Coconino County, the surreal-metaphysical desert of the comic book Krazy Kat. Expect large-scale abstract paintings but also moving sculptures.”

www.timothytaylorgallery.co.uk

by Skye Sherwin