Estelle Garcia Blanco was born in 1995. Artist-designer, she actually lives and works in Belgium. After studying fashion in Brussels, she starts working in the fashion industry as a featherworker in the workshops of the Maison Lemarié in Paris. She specialised herself in Textile Design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Since always fascinated by design and craft, she decides to modernise the featherworker craft and its ancestral techniques to propose a new vision of the feathers. She is interested in exploring the delicate frontiers between fashion and art. In her work, she only uses upcycled feathers from secondhand pillows and deadstock textile. She is one of the winners of the Espronceda Prize delivered by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
Artist statement
Using animal materials is increasingly complicated and out ofstep with our current societal and environmental concerns. By recovering secondhand pillows, Estelle Garcia Blanco finds a material rich in meaning : recycled waste and an intimate symbolic object. Through the use of overcycled pillows, it questions our intimate consciousness linked to a daily object. What is the relationship between the pillow and its feathers? This gesture of opening an old pillow looks like turning the skin of a bird. Those poultry feathers has proved to be rich in possibilities, up to the point of giving rise to several substances. Worked on the surface, it becomes a fictitious skin, with a fur appearance. Working into space, it becomes a hybrid body with all the dreamlike load that this entails. The structure of the mobile recreates the illusion of an invisible skin. But above all, the bird, as a poetic animal, appears like the mirror of our ecological concerns and try to give our waste their rightful place.