There is something deeply compelling about the way Delphine Dénéréaz approaches textile. In her hands, weaving becomes far more than process or ornamentation. It transforms into architecture, ecology, memory and resistance simultaneously. Working across large-scale installation, sculpture and traditional textile techniques, Dénéréaz has developed a practice that repositions weaving within contemporary public space, elevating materials and gestures historically confined to the domestic sphere into immersive environments that feel both monumental and intimate.
Rooted in ancestral textile traditions yet unmistakably contemporary in execution, her work explores the emotional and political histories embedded within fabric, reuse and craft. Drawing upon lirette weaving, a medieval technique built from recycled textiles, Dénéréaz creates installations that carry traces of collective memory while engaging directly with urgent conversations surrounding ecology, sustainability and public interaction. Her structures often resemble temporary sanctuaries or fragile habitats, spaces that invite visitors not simply to observe, but to enter, inhabit and experience physically.
At the centre of her recent installation Dandelions Always Return, presented in King’s Cross for Earth Day 2026, is the image of nature quietly reclaiming space. Through woven floral forms, vivid colour and porous architectural structures, Dénéréaz constructs a world where domestic boundaries dissolve and the natural environment re-emerges as something persistent, resilient and impossible to fully suppress. There is playfulness in the work, but also a deeper reflection on what society chooses to discard, control or overlook, whether that be weeds, recycled materials or forms of labour historically associated with women.
In this conversation with The Flux Review, Dénéréaz discusses her journey into textile practice, the emotional power of weaving, the politics of craft, public interaction, ecological symbolism and the evolving role of textile within contemporary art today.
You have developed a distinctive practice that sits at the intersection of craft, sculpture and large-scale installation, rooted in weaving and textile processes. Could you tell us about your journey into art, and what led you to choose this medium as the foundation of your work?
I chose La Cambre first for the breadth of what was on offer , there were eighteen workshops when I arrived, and I had to pick one to sit the entrance exam. I came from a design background, hesitating between fashion and industrial design, and ended up choosing textile without really knowing what I was getting into. The entrance exam lasts five days in the workshop. Those five days were a revelation : the feeling of being exactly where I was supposed to be. I stayed for five years, did my bachelor’s and my master’s, and I have never considered another medium since. I finished my master’s thirteen years ago
Weaving specifically came to me because someone gave me a loom when I finished school. The more I weave, the more I want to weave. That’s still true.
I also grew up in an old magnanerie, a silkworm farm in Provence so textile was already in the testimonies before it was in my hands.
Your work often draws on traditional weaving techniques and ancestral knowledge. How do these histories shape the way you approach contemporary public installations?
Weaving is twelve thousand years old. The fact that the gestures are still being transmitted today, all over the world, is something I find genuinely moving. I feel connected to all the weavers who came before me.
Lirette specifically is a technique built on reuse, you weave with strips of recycled fabric rather than yarn. It was called the poor man’s carpet. These rugs weren’t displayed; they stayed inside the home. What interests me is taking that technique, one that was never meant to be seen and bringing it into public spaces, institutions, large-scale commissions. There’s something political in that displacement, especially as a woman artist working with a medium that was historically assigned to women and considered a minor craft. The textile is starting to enter museums and collections, to assert itself. I’m proud to be part of that.
Dandelions Always Return transforms a domestic structure into a space overtaken by nature. What drew you to the idea of the ‘home’ as a shared environment between humans and the natural world?
The home has always been central to my work not as a cosy or nostalgic symbol, but as a starting point for occupying a larger space. Taking up room, transmitting, surviving despite uniformity.
For this installation, I wanted to make a structure visitors could actually enter. Once you’re inside, the boundaries start to dissolve. Nature isn’t decorating the walls here it has pushed through them. The house is still recognisable, it has a roof, windows, a fence, a letterbox, but it has been taken over. To remain Nature is our first Home
My castles and houses are always open, without drawbridges or walls. They tell a different kind of story.
I also grew up surrounded by a particular landscape. Since returning to live in the countryside, my work has been saturated with nature. It wasn’t a decision it came naturally.
The dandelion is often overlooked, even dismissed as a weed. What symbolic weight does it hold for you within this installation?
The dandelion pushes through cracks in concrete, resists herbicides, comes back every year regardless of what you do to it. It’s also one of the first plants to feed pollinators in early spring, when there’s almost nothing else available.
We spend considerable energy pulling it out. I find that worth examining.
What attracts me to plants like the dandelion or flowers in general is their ambiguity. They’re beautiful, soft, joyful, but also toxic, sharp, invasive. I use floral motifs a lot in my work, but not as decoration. I try to pull the flower out of its purely decorative role, to make it the subject. Weaving the dandelion large, making it the face of the house at architectural scale, is part of that same gesture.
The work coincides with Earth Day 2026 and its theme Our Power, Our Planet. How did this context influence the conceptual development of the piece?
The theme gave me a useful frame, but the questions were already there. I’ve been interested for a long time in what we cultivate, what we eliminate, what we leave alone and in the relationship between the domestic and the ecological.
What the Earth Day context offered was a specific public setting. King’s Cross is not a gallery. The piece needed to work as an invitation first, before it worked as anything else. The structure is open on all sides. People can walk in or not. That openness matters.
Your use of woven textiles and fabric forests introduces a softness into an otherwise urban, architectural space. How important is tactility and materiality in shaping the viewer’s emotional response?
Very. With time I’ve come to realise that I work textile the way others work paint, filling the space, making colour vibrate, letting the gesture be visible. There’s something of the Fauves in it: pure colour, sometimes violent, in flat areas.
Textile has a body. It moves in the wind, it absorbs light differently throughout the day, it has a scale that relates to the human body in a specific way. When you stand inside a structure made of woven fabric, something shifts, the acoustics change, the light changes, your sense of enclosure changes.
The contrast between the rigid steel mesh and the organic softness of the fabric is also constitutive of the work. Here, tapestry doesn’t hang on the wall – it is the wall. A porous partition that reveals rather than conceals.
Public art invites a very different kind of audience interaction compared to gallery settings. What have you observed from the way people engage with this installation in King’s Cross?
People stop. In a space designed for transit, that’s already significant.
I think of my installations as small ephemeral habitats cabins, chapels, improvised shelters. Precarious refuges: they hold, they welcome, but they never enclose. It’s that tension between hospitality and fragility that interests me the aesthetic of a party that could collapse at any moment but holds anyway, and that’s exactly what makes it beautiful.
I noticed that children pull adults in, and then the dynamic reverses adults slow down and start reading the work in ways children don’t yet. The act of entering matters. Walking through the doorway of a textile house is a different experience from looking at it.
The installation has prompted responses from the local community. How important is dialogue with place and audience in shaping your work, and did any reactions in King’s Cross surprise you?
People mentioned the dandelion personally not as a symbol but through their own experience. Someone talked about their grandmother’s garden. Someone else about having stopped trying to get rid of them on their allotment. Those small conversations are part of what the work is for.
I don’t design pieces around expected responses, but I pay attention to where I’m working. The work has always been about objects and materials that carry an emotional charge like the dolphin beach towel, the plastic keyring on a school bag, worn fabric that has lived in someone’s hands. That same logic applies to place.
There is a sense of playfulness and optimism in the work, yet it carries a deeper ecological message. How do you balance accessibility with critical intent in your practice?
I’m wary of work that announces its seriousness too loudly. The critical content is already there if you look : in the choice of a discarded plant, in the use of recycled materials, in the image of a domestic structure being overtaken by what we’ve tried to exclude.
My work draws on pop culture, folk traditions, children’s imagery, very saturated colours. I grew up with these references and I find them honest. Gravity and naivety can coexist they often do. The ambiguity in something like the flower motif beautiful, joyful, but also toxic and invasive is where the interesting things happen. A makeshift castle, precarious and habitable and imaginary. Priceless in the eyes of our inner children who don’t need more than that to feel wonder.
Your work reinterprets lirette, a medieval technique rooted in reuse. How does sustainability inform both your materials and your wider artistic philosophy?
Lirette was built on reuse by definition. It was not a choice I made only for ethical reasons, but also because it is more emotional. When I weave with already-used fabric, I am working with accumulated time, with the anonymous physical memory of people who lived in those materials.
My first woven piece, for my degree show, was made from plastic bags I had collected in China. What interests me is what we do with what we’re left with the marginal objects, the ones set aside. Things with little monetary value but enormous sentimental weight.
The installation suggests that nature is not absent from urban environments, but simply waiting to re-emerge. Do you see your work as a form of quiet intervention within the city?
Yes, though the colours are not particularly quiet.
The intervention operates on a different register from most urban signage. It doesn’t ask anything of you immediately. The dandelion is a good model: it doesn’t need permission, it appears where conditions allow. I like the idea of a textile structure operating with something of the same logic present, persistent, not aggressive.
Finally, how do you hope Dandelions Always Return will linger with visitors once they leave the space, particularly in how they think about their own relationship to the environment?
I hope people pause for a second before pulling out the next dandelion they see. That would be already nice!
But I also hope people leave with a different eye for what gets pushed to the margins a dandelion in a crack, a technique passed down quietly for generations, a form of knowledge that was never considered serious. These things tell us who we are and what we share.
And I hope they remember to look up. The sky is the one space that belongs to everyone equally. There’s something important in that gesture looking up, in the middle of a city, inside a woven house.
Looking ahead, are there any forthcoming projects or new directions you are currently developing that you can share with us?
I’m continuing to develop large-scale woven installations for public spaces, and in the same tuime making some new researchs for smaller pieces weaved on loom
In May, I’m presenting an outdoor installation at Horst Festival in Vilvoorde a piece that will remain on site for three years. Like the house at King’s Cross, inviting people to look up.
And in July, I’m opening a solo exhibition at La Filature in Varennes-sur-Dun, on the 31st.
And I keep weaving. The more I weave, the more I want to weave!
For more information, visit delphinedenereaz.com
Dandelions Always Return is on view in Granary Square, King’s Cross until 1 June.
Delphine is represented by MTArt Agency
