AMÉLIE DAUTEUR – "Tsumugi"

2026
6/12
Painted ceramic on a wooden  base
Height: 38 cm

TSUMUGI

The word tsumugi (紬) names both a gesture and a fabric: it comes from the verb tsumugu (紡ぐ), "to spin," the act of drawing continuous thread from raw, broken fiber. Traditionally, tsumugi silk was woven not from perfect cocoons but from waste ones — irregular, slubbed, refused by finer trades. What could not be unwound cleanly was instead spun by hand into something coarser, warmer, marked by its own history.

This etymology carries an aesthetic lineage. It resonates with the mingei philosophy articulated by Yanagi Sōetsu in the 1920s and 30s, which found in the unpolished object of daily use — the mended, the irregular, the handmade — a beauty that industrial perfection could not reach. Tsumugi belongs to that same order of things: value born not despite imperfection, but through it.

With this totem, Amélie Dauteur takes up spinning as a figure for continuity itself — the way a life, like a thread, is pieced together from what survives intact and what does not. The body here is neither seamless nor broken; it is spun, thread by thread, out of its own remnants.

TSUMUGI does not ask to be smooth. It asks: what have you gathered from what was left unfinished?