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céline vahsen
Céline Vahsen is Brussels-based visual artist working with textile as her primary medium. Educated at La Cambre and
across Europe, her practice is rooted in ancestral techniques such as weaving and natural dyeing, bringing this heritage into a contemporary context.
Through a deeply personal approach, the artist engages with techniques rooted in ancestral textile practices, drawing on
natural dyeing and pre-industrial weaving methods as both a point of departure and a critical dialogue with contemporary fabric production.
By transporting this heritage into the realm of contemporary art, she creates works that, like all textiles, carry stories within their very material: conveying narratives, preserving memory, and revealing embedded emotions.
Using leftover threads from Scabal’s British mills, she constructs images directly within the fabric: naturally dyed threads accumulate rhythmically, line by line, through repetitive gestures between the past and the future.
Rather than applying pigment onto a surface, color emerges from within, as interwoven hues radiate and unfold across the composition. These woven fragments, sewn together, form pictorial images which, once stretched onto the frame, assert the canvas as both medium and subject, emancipated as a painting-like work. Through this act of stretching, the artist affirms the autonomy of textile, echoing its significance within modernist abstraction while simultaneously challenging traditional hierarchies between craft and fine art. By making thread both surface and image, she ultimately questions the very nature of representation itself.
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