«Quelque chose de brillant avec des trous
c’est ainsi qu’une jeune fille, ayant retrouvé la vue,
a un jour décrit une main.¹»

Le vide en main succinctly captures Silvana Mc Nulty’s artistic practice. She continuously generates hybrid, flexible, and unstable entities, based on principles of assemblage and the repurposing of objects combined with or through textiles.

The hand is that of the artist, moving daily with her tools, her ball of yarn and her crochet hook, working freely in the places she passes through.

The void is what appears in the knots of stitches, the perforations of objects, and the gaps experienced by viewers as they attempt to resolve certain enigmas deliberately posed by the works. Indeed, these works are built upon oxymorons and paradoxes that shape our world. Whether through the subversive alliance of objects and materials that seem a priori incompatible, or through a hesitant appropriation of space, they explore zones of friction between rigidity and flexibility, interior and exterior, fragility and resistance, transparency and opacity, visible and invisible, or perhaps even usefulness and beauty.

Trained in jewelry-making before pursuing a degree in visual arts, Silvana Mc Nulty’s work is grounded in a practice of hybridization—of mediums, objects, and materials—guided by a form of cooperation or attentive listening to their enigmatic voices. When the artist uses shells, protractors, spoons, and paper clips in her sculptures, this cooperation takes the form of misuse or subversion. She thus reveals other qualities and properties of things, “making them more alive” by playing with the possibilities generated by the oblique strategies intrinsic to assemblage.

The repetition of forms, gestures, and choices of materials and objects produces assemblages that carry their own narratives; yet when considered as a whole, they can be understood as words forming the lexicon of a foreign language. The works thus become so many frameworks that can be unfolded or folded back, where everyday materials, gestures, and fragmented narratives intertwine, evoking another space-time.

Silvana Mc Nulty (born 1995) lives and works in Paris. She holds an AFEDAP diploma in Jewelry from Paris, before continuing her studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam) and at HEAR (Strasbourg). She has exhibited, among others, at In Extenso (Clermont-Ferrand), the Manufacture de Roubaix, Le Creux de l’Enfer (Thiers), Treize (Paris), the Salon de Montrouge, the Crédac (Ivry-sur-Seine), and at Brey-et-Maison-du-Bois for the Art en Chapelles Biennale (Jura). She is represented by Galerie Florence Loewy in Paris.