Estelle Bourdet

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Estelle Bourdet is a Swiss-Swedish textile designer and hand weaver offering production, design and consultancy on textiles and materials for interior and product.

She investigates the domestic environment by exploring the handcraft of textile making with a focus on analog weaving techniques and digitally processed motifs and patterns. With textile as main medium, she graduated in fine arts at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne ECAL, experimented with textile techniques during a year at the Hochschule Luzern HSLU, moved to Sweden and immersed herself in traditional textile handcrafts at the school for craft and design, Capellagården.

Estelle’s work aims to be a social and temporal recontextualisation of the handcraft of carpet making that exists in Sweden since the 18th century. A handcraft which consists of collecting and ripping old fabrics for the weft of a weavings. Her practice of hand weaving merges key ideas of domestic zones, inhabited spaces, the use of sustainable resources and the slow production making.

This approach brings a potential of randomness that Estelle Bourdet skillfully exploits. The use of sustainable resources, the complete control of the manufacturing process, the slow production method and the openly displayed traces of ancient craftsmanship make the works distinctive one-of-a-kind pieces that can be considered both art and utilitarian.

By combining the traditional manufacturing technique of hand weaving with digital design processes, Estelle Bourdet creates an independent visual language of high aesthetic quality. Her works make the designer’s values visible: she collects old textiles and vegetable dyes, makes her own dyes, and interprets an old recycling method in a contemporary way.

Her works have something ensouled about them, they dress spaces and create specific atmospheres. By giving old textiles a new life, they also become places of memory. And Estelle Bourdet’s pieces bring something else to mind. The special thing about the textile image is the fact that fabric and image merge and there is no difference between the image and the subject.