On the Île aux Fagots, we see a small golden boat called Navette floating on the water… In this region intimately linked to textiles since the Middle Ages, the boat symbolises for the artist the shuttle used on the looms, a tribute to the flourishing past of the Amiens textile industry. The artist here tries to promote the interaction between his practice of «drawing» by materialising it, and the perception that the visitor may have of it when discovering it in a public space, that of the Hortillonnages.
Since 2011, Keita Mori has been developing his own technique in his drawings: with a glue gun, he applies threads to paper or a wall. The uniform lines, obtained with the threads, symbolises the component elements of a «system» or a «society»; they testify to a temporary and ambiguous reality, to plastic research on «fragments of the world» such as movement, time and space.
By participating in the International Garden Festival | Hortillonnages Amiens, the artist explains that he wishes to mark a decisive turning point in his artistic activities. If in recent years he has focused on the art of drawing, with the act of «drawing lines», he has been exploring since 2021, with the 10th year of the Bug Report series, new possibilities of creating three-dimensional work, and to produce some with objects related to textiles. With the shuttle crossing the fabric from right to left, the artist reveals a new line. The chain of movements that pierces through both sides of the material is also an allegory of «birth» which is repeated endlessly in the world in which we live.
With Navette, it is an original «texture» of the city that reveals the invisible exchanges between a large audience and a work of art, between a stable world and a moving world; as if the history of Amiens had been woven again.
The artist
Keita Mori