Who: Estelle Bourdet is a textile designer who investigates the domestic environment by revisiting the popular handcraft of carpetmaking with digitally processed motifs and patterns.
When: With a scholarship from the Ikea Foundation, she’s now in her second year at the Capellagården school of craft and design, Öland in Sweden, an institution founded by designer Carl Malmsten. Bourdet plans to open a textile studio in Switzerland together with the designer Marie Jambers. They showed together last year at La Placette and Bourdet’s work was exhibited at the Common Threads pop-up at 99 Juta in Johannesburg.
Where: After opting for textiles as her main medium during her bachelor’s degree in fine arts at ECAL, Lausanne, Bourdet specialised at the HSLU, Lucerne.
What: Driven by an interest in reinvigorating the domestic space, which is nowadays mostly equipped with standardised objects, Bourdet has developed her project Surfaces domestiques. Using a technique of weaving recycled strips of cotton sheet that has been popular in Sweden since the 18th century, she designs more complex patterns and inserts visual motifs and symbols from the domestic space. Inspired by the functions that the different domestic spaces fulfil, she sketches each piece with digital tools and also dyes the fabric herself to achieve the desired colour range.
Why: Her unique and handmade creations subtly displace the function of the carpet and give it a surprising contemporary visuality.