Joana Vasconcelos on Making Art When the World Is Falling Apart – WWD

PARIS — Ten years after taking over the Château de Versailles with her giant textile sculptures in a show that drew a record-breaking 1.6 million visitors, Joana Vasconcelos is back in another historic location a stone’s throw from Paris — this time with a different kind of monumental installation.

The Portuguese artist is presenting a towering fabric structure called the “Tree of Life” at the Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes, a soaring Gothic-style chapel founded in the 14th century on the grounds of the Château de Vincennes east of Paris, on the edge of a 2,450-acre forest.

Vasconcelos developed the concept for the Galleria Borghese in Rome, where the tree was to echo Apollo and Daphne, a Baroque marble sculpture by Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. It refers to the Greek myth of Daphne, who transforms into a laurel tree to escape the lustful advances of the god Apollo.

The feminist artist, who sees the tree as a tribute to Daphne’s gesture of independence and self-determination, kept the project alive during the pandemic’s confinement by having her team work on the sculpture’s textile leaves. “We embroidered 70,000 leaves in two years,” she recalls. “It was one thing that we could do from home, and everybody could help out.”

After the exhibition in Rome fell through, curator Jean-François Chougnet proposed bringing the sculpture to Vincennes. “I expanded the project and adapted it completely to the Sainte-Chapelle,” says Vasconcelos, who more than doubled the height of the tree to just under 43 feet, and ended up using 110,000 leaves.

Its rich red, brown and gold color palette echoes the chapel’s stained-glass windows, known for their vivid colors and depictions of flames. The work also draws inspiration from Catherine de’ Medici, who oversaw the decoration of the chapel in the 16th century, as a way of asserting her power as a woman at the time.

Vasconcelos, who was born in Paris, recalls coming to the Vincennes forest as a child. These days, the woodland is threatened by a project to extend the Paris subway line to the suburbs, which environmental campaigners say will entail cutting down thousands of trees.

For the artist, the “Tree of Life” addresses not only the issue of sustainability but themes such as renewal, family and our connection to the universe — issues she’s grappling with amid the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic. Vasconcelos said she was touched by Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh’s analogy comparing humans to trees.

“We connect with our roots to the earth through our feet, we have a trunk, which is our body, and then we have our minds and our spirits that connect with the skies,” she says. “If we don’t take care of those three dimensions, we are not balanced. And so I was like, ‘OK, this is exactly what I feel with this project.’”

The embroidery on the leaves, based on a traditional Portuguese technique, is enhanced with glass beads and LED lights, Vasconcelos explains ahead of the opening of the exhibition, which was pushed back several times due to logistical issues linked to the ripple effects of the pandemic. The sculpture is now set to go on view next spring.

“It shines in a very bright way, in this kind of spiritual ambience of hope and of transformation,” she says. “It’s going to be a wonderful project, a beautiful piece — not a piece that is very mechanical or industrial, but it’s more a poetic and spiritual work, and it’s the correct one for a moment like this.”

It would seem she’s not the only one thinking this way: both Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri and Indian designer Rahul Mishra referenced the tree of life in their recent haute couture collections. Vasconcelos compares it to the way that trees communicate through their roots.

“This kind of information that the trees send to each other, and makes them connected to each other, is something that we human beings forgot how to do. And when you see people like Maria Grazia and me, and other artists and people, talking about the same thing, it means that it’s still working, this connection between people,” she says. “We need to be more aware, and more connected to each other, in order to save the planet.”

Vasconcelos, who is also working on a collaboration with a major luxury house, originally studied jewelry design and drawing, and has always nurtured a close relationship with fashion.

Her work taps into materials and techniques that were long confined to the domestic sphere, and she has exhibited both in leading museums, such as billionaire François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi in Venice, and retail spaces like Le Bon Marché, the department store owned by French luxury group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

Recently, she returned to her roots with a show of sculptural necklaces at Esther de Beaucé’s Minimasterpiece gallery in Paris. “She has such a lovely collection, I just want to buy everything,” she enthuses. “If this goes well, we’ll do something else. It’s not my goal to be a jewel maker, but it’s always fun to do different things with different people.”

Looking back on her journey from working on the body to creating large-scale installations in public spaces, Vasconcelos reflects: “I went from the finger to the public space, from micro to macro space.”

Her next project is her most ambitious yet: a permanent outdoor installation called “The Wedding Cake” on the grounds of Waddesdon Manor in England, the historic estate of the Rothschild family. “You can actually go inside of the wedding cake, go to the top of the wedding cake, and you become the figure on the top, so it’s a crazy project,” Vasconcelos says of the ceramic-tiled structure.

Like the “Tree of Life,” the project has been dogged with logistical hurdles, but the artist is undeterred. In fact, she’s about to add another layer of complication to her process with plans to turn her studio in Lisbon, where engineers and architects rub elbows with seamstresses and embroiderers, into an open space and museum.

“One of the things we discovered through the years is that people, when they come and visit us, they are delighted by the studio itself. It’s not about me or my work personally, it’s about the studio as a family, as an entity, as a school, as a place of exchanging knowledge,” Vasconcelos says.

She sees the 50-person workshop as a modern-day equivalent to the buzzy ateliers run by Old Masters like Rembrandt and Rubens.

“We are in the historical line of the big studios that always existed,” she explains. “Most of the studios of today, they are not visitable and they are very digitalized. They depend on computers, and we don’t. We depend on crafts, so we are different and more related to Rubens’ studio than we are to a contemporary studio, and that’s what makes us unique.”

Her recent induction into France’s prestigious Order of Arts and Letters has made Vasconcelos even more determined to forge ahead with her work, no matter how much turbulence she encounters.

“Having that recognition means that I’ve done something well, and that’s really good, but I also see it as a passage, and the moment where we have to keep on going, and people believe that it’s worthwhile to keep on trying every day. That’s what I do, you know — every day I try my best,” she says. “It hasn’t been easy but it has been a pleasure, and so I’m very thankful for having this life.”