Twenty one years ago, after the birth of her son, Louise-Marie Cumont realised she wouldn’t be able to continue as a sculptor. In the presence of the newborn, the daily familiarity of stone, of dust, of the chisels and hammers suddenly turned hazardous. And she had “no energy to carry on” either.
Subsequently, she started making books and found a “new world of creation, a new language” in them. And she sculpted them out of cloth. Although these books belong to the tradition of the children’s picture book, they are distinguished by their innovation with material and form.
Speaking on the sidelines of the recent Bookaroo festival, Cumont says she is interested in “discovering all kinds of possibilities in the book.” Free from the limitations of paper, the books are highly interactive; their pages contain multiple scenarios that derive from the pliability of cloth. Devoid of text, the books can be read in any order.
Cumont describes her books as ‘silent’ but there is something almost musical about them. In their arrangement, the books follow the structure of variations on a single theme.
Explaining her approach, Cumont says, “I discover an image, dream on the image and try to understand what I want to say.” These images usually derive from quotidian objects or situations in life, and are perhaps best represented in “Au Lit”. The book contains designs of people sleeping, and each design is differentiated by the use of fabric, which ranges from military camouflage to the traditional tie and dye.
“I found that in books I could say very different things than in sculpture. My sculptures were completely abstract and I started doing figurative art only with my books,” she says. But the abstract often returns in a playful garb in the books.
Her book on her home, for instance, contains 24 possibilities of her house which are almost always the same, yet always different. An exercise in geometry on the surface of it, the book is also “a way for me to speak about my relationship with my house.”
In “Au Lit”, two of the images relate to the way man relates to night.
The first of these is a design of a modern man, sleeping peacefully in front of his television and the night is an extension of his television screen – an unending magnetic field. On the facing page, there is a design of a tribal man, out in the open, cloaked by nightmares. These two images sum up the philosophy of the artist – to say something about the world in a way that is not didactic.
In India for the first time, Cumont says she is fond of the arts and crafts she has discovered here. She has a project with Tara Books, an independent publisher based in Chennai, to make a book with Indian fabrics. “I know Indian fabrics, but now I have to think with Indian fabrics.”
