Studio Visit: Valérie Mannaerts
J’accueille
Valérie Mannaerts’ ongoing projects include: Private Architecture (Joyfully Wet), a commission by the city of Antwerp for the Collection Kunst in de Stad, and Private Architecture (R.M.), commissioned by the Flemish Community and ZIN (Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire building in Brussels). In 2026, she will have a solo exhibition at M Leuven.
Valérie Mannaerts welcomes people and artworks with equal warmth into her life. When I visit Valérie in her studio in Molenbeek, right off Ribaucourt, I enter a beautiful flat in a stunning art deco building. It seems very bruxellois, to discover a place you would not expect to find in this neighbourhood. The space is full of light, with a view and a library, and tastefully furnished down to the bathroom sink. I am greeted by the artist whom I had met before when she came and visited my studio, entering as a breath of fresh air. I am curious to continue our conversation about the idea of spaces, collage and a creating a hybrid praxis — all things we share.
The apartment-turned-studio seems to be a great place to dwell and produce in peace — much closer to the idea of a home than to the romantic ideal of a studio, which potentially also comes with leaky roofs and windows. The artist is very clear about what the physicality of this place of thought and production ought to be: ‘It’s all about practicalities’, she says. Less dealing with real estate, more dealing with the work. It’s about a feeling of total ease, which for her means comfort, enough space, good light and a view, as well as minimising sources of nuisance and maximising the time spent on your work — essentially, economising your own time and resources.
For her, someone who is equally invested in spaces and materials, the studio needs to be as much a mental space as a physical one. She describes it in terms of two time zones: the time at the actual site of the exhibition that requires attention, patience and focus — a ‘listening-to’ — and the time in the studio, where the artist opens up body and mind to be receptive to, or as she says in French — ‘accueillir’ — to welcome the work. Expanding yourself to receive whatever comes at that moment and trusting the mechanism, following the work. The work leads the way, not the artist who projects their own agenda onto the materials. It is an intuitive way of working, where artist and materials have equal say in what becomes of them. The studio is at once a concrete, tangible place and a mental space with its own very different logic and activities.
When it comes to working with spaces, there is always the question of what an artist’s contribution can be, what presence an artwork can have at a specific site. It begins with perceiving the space through your own sensibilities, trying to understand it, listening to it and seeing what would make sense to add. Spaces do ask for things, and it is part of the artist’s responsibility to confront this fact. Here, again, time is as essential as the space itself. It is a listening to your own body and the site — trying to find a way to look back and at the same time into the future. What is the history of this place, and what will become of it?
Last year, Mannaerts introduced Private Architecture (BeursBourse) to the public, an artwork commissioned for the former stock exchange in Brussels. Consisting of a handmade mosaic infused into artisanal terrazzo, it covers the entire floor of the monumental building in the centre of Brussels. The idea was to make something fresh and dynamic, incorporating mobile shapes that reference human scale. In designing the mosaic, the artist drew on the history of terrazzo as carriers of iconography and images. By mirroring the ceiling of the Bourse with its vegetal motifs, she addresses the relationship between image and space.
Because her approach is intuitive, the body plays an undeniable role in Mannaerts’ practice: her body, the body of materials and that of the audience are always prevalent in the work. There is the mere practicality of being able to lift, carry around and place her own materials, which you can see reflected in the materials themselves: tulle, canvas, paper, plexiglass, paint (all light and easily manipulated supplies), as well as the physical manipulation of the audience’s reception of her work. There are the giant (T-)shirts (Private Architecture (R.M.)), currently exhibited at CCINQ in Brussels, which she will exhibit as part of a mobile at ZIN in December 2024. There is the oversized tulle dress that towers over the viewer (Freedom to Think of Things in Themselves, 2020), the wearable painted-silk canvas kimono (Arbalette, 2016), the large striped figure (Private Human, 2017) that conspicuously resembles a changing-room dress used on beaches, and the seemingly too-small shoes filled with bronze buns (Tender Vessel, 2024). They all lead back to the relationship between artist, artwork and viewer, and the physicality of that experience of making and seeing.
Valérie Mannaerts has an interest in total immersion, in making the body the centre of the work. Arbalette (2016) functions as a wearable canvas kimono with an inside made of silk to protect its wearer and their body. It is sensuous and extremely intimate — a doubling or a translation of the wearer’s body and inner world. The outside is made from rougher cotton to protect the person wearing it. Like a cape of confidence, hugging someone who needs it — true intimacy can only ever come from layers of trust. Layering is present in much of her work: some of her sculptures wear collars (a truncated version of a protective cape), adding an extra layer of information and protecting the sculpture underneath. When I ask about their meaning, she refers to the ‘sandwich-wo/man’, a kind of running flag, a human billboard or carrier of information, mostly used to advertise goods or stores. This figure works as a nomadic pedestal for the information they carry, comparable to how an artwork functions as a bearer of images and meaning.
It is obvious that Mannaerts’ sculptures emerge out of a practice of collage, meaning that her sculptures and assemblages are constructed layer by layer, image by image, using as many media as she sees fit. Photography, painting, canvas and tulle have been recurring elements in her work. She tries to emphasize this tension, between that which doesn’t belong (‘un corps étranger’) and that which seems familiar. The artist stays open to chance encounters, surprises, things she potentially never thought of. The challenge is always: how to make it work, allowing foreign entities to converse with each other until they click into place and become one. Collage has long been a medium used in times of trouble, fractured pieces that reflect fractured moments, a strategy to allow for the work to become whole again. It holds within it a potential for transformation, a full embrace of metamorphosis.
When I ask her how she chose the images for Freedom to Think of Things in Themselves (2020), she says that she is always looking for a sense of autonomy, a certain sense of detachment that radiates from the portraits. I recall seeing the sculpture in real life and remembering one image, of a young Sarah Polley. Two years later, the actress would publish her memoir Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, which seems a fitting coincidence since there is (a notion of) risk-taking in Valérie Mannaerts’ work: handling all kinds of materials at liberty, challenging herself and the work, in order to constantly bring her own practice forward.
Although she is hesitant to use metaphor, she sometimes compares her practice to a house with different rooms: in the past, she would always stay in one and then move on to the next. Now, ‘with a bit of concentration’, there are no more doors — everything is open on every level, she moves back and forth if she wants to, everything communicates with everything else. Hers is a hybrid practice, her work is both inside and outside, public and private, since every room is able to be tapped into.
With the evasion of categorisation within a specific medium, there is freedom, openness and a need for curiosity. This seems to me a gratifying way to work as an artist, in terms of developing the mark of your own practice and your position within the field. But it can also represent the more difficult path in the context of an art-market logic in which a lack of definition, or recognition, is harder to understand, market or sell. Nevertheless, many artists have invested in those in-between spaces and Valérie Mannaerts has her own vocabulary. This sometimes means letting go of controlling the work and spending more time with it.
Time spent on/with the work is one of the most important factors in determining whether a piece is ‘successful’. The physical and mental space where this happens is the studio, containing you, the artist, and the work that wants to be received, dealt with, transformed and put out into the world. In Valérie Mannaerts’ words: ‘I always think there is so much work inside of me, I have to sit down, welcome and receive it, so that it can come out and be in the world — j’accueille.’