Invite an artist. Co-build a protocol. Let the work circulate differently.
Tana Kim® invites a contemporary visual artist to inhabit a medium they have never explored before: the trapeze skirt and the coordinated bag. Not a commission.
Not a print on fabric. A residency, a time of encounter, experimentation, co-construction between two worlds that might never have met.
Together, the creator and the artist develop a protocol. The artist paints. Tana Kim® shapes. The protocol transforms. What you wear today can become a painting tomorrow.
Two gestures. One same breath.
Why a residency and not a collaboration?
The word matters. A collaboration produces. A residency explores. At Tana Kim®, the artist does not work from a brief defined in advance.
The artist brings their universe, their series, their way of seeing — and it is from the encounter between their gesture and the textile medium that the collection is born. The result is not decreed. It is discovered.
Michel Clouin has been working for years on form, trace and the dialogue between mediums.
Acrylic, oil, ink or wax paintings, on canvas, paper, Plexiglas, Rhodoïd.
From one series to the next, he reinvents himself without ever renouncing the hand, the material, the gesture.
It is this consistent commitment to excellence that led Nathalie to offer him the Tana Kim® medium.
His series Danses and Retours now live on the pieces of the Expression collection — worn, in movement, where no one expected them.
Michel Clouin, visual artist.
"My work moves between figuration and abstraction. It evolves with time — always searching for new translations, new restitutions. Each series is a reflection, like so many bricks building a perception.
I paint reality to brush against the unspeakable, I touch abstraction to reveal lived experience. To speak with one voice, to paint with one hand. My work is a walk in search of perspectives, of different gazes, each step leads to another, each canvas flows into the next, one gesture, so as not to die confined."
Every Expression piece is unique.
It carries the hand of Michel Clouin, painted directly onto the fabric, and the gesture of Nathalie Tardif who conceived and shaped it.
It is worn. It is shown. It is transformed.
Through the protocol co-developed during the residency, some pieces can become paintings, diptych or quadriptych.
The body is the first exhibition space.
The wall is the second.
At the Musée Soulages in Rodez, Nathalie and Michel visit the Agnès Varda exhibition.
Two creative worlds facing the work of a woman who never accepted being told where art should live.
"I am curious. Full stop. I find everything very interesting. Real life. Fake life…" Agnès Varda
This sentence could have been theirs.
