Le collier rouge des reines nues
Galerie Claire Corcia | March 6 – April 12, 2025
As part of Le collier rouge des reines nues, presented at Galerie Claire Corcia in Paris from March 6 to April 12, 2025, Honargardi had the opportunity to speak with the artist about her creative universe, artistic practice, and the ideas that shape her work.
Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, contemporary embroidery, installation, and collaborative performance, she has developed a multidisciplinary visual language that explores the relationships between memory, nature, femininity, mythology, dreams, and the unconscious. Her works invite viewers into poetic, hybrid worlds where symbolism and intuition coexist, encouraging multiple interpretations rather than fixed narratives.
In this conversation, the artist reflects on her creative process, the influence of textile traditions, the symbolism behind The Red Necklace of the Naked Queens, the role of altered states of consciousness in artistic creation, and the impact of travel, collaboration, and social engagement on her practice. She also shares her thoughts on ecofeminism, art education, and the responsibility of artists in today’s world.
The following is the complete interview, published exactly as it was conducted, without any edits to the questions or the artist’s responses.
Artistic Vision & Creative Process
Your work spans painting, drawing, engraving, and contemporary embroidery. How do you decide which medium best serves a particular concept?
Painting on canvas, drawing on paper, engraving, and embroidery each require a different state of mind. Depending on my inner state, I choose to paint with oil when I need to express more physical or intuitive emotions. I turn to engraving when I need to bring order to my thoughts or shift my perspective. I draw when I don’t have long periods of time ahead of me, when I lack space, when my schedule is overloaded, or when I need to focus. As for embroidery, it is an interesting practice for developing my formal repertoire, refining my gestures, exploring new themes, and expanding my color palette.
In fact, I need to change mediums, tools, formats, and techniques because these changes renew my creativity. Each medium requires different neural connections, and the more I renew these connections, the more I feel my creativity expanding. The brain is as plastic as the art I practice!
Your artistic journey has evolved across multiple disciplines and influences. How do you see your early background in textile design shaping your current artistic language?
The study of textiles, their history, and the diversity of techniques across the world is an incredible and inexhaustible source of inspiration. I have a strong attraction to patterns and love creating color palettes. I also pay great attention to the details of my compositions.
On a symbolic level, thread has a unifying power: it connects stories, mends, assembles, weaves, and knits. Textile techniques such as weaving, knitting, and embroidery have a special relationship with time—a long, cyclical time that unfolds in stages.
In my painting and engraving work, I find a similar step-by-step approach, alternating between purely gestural and technical phases and more cerebral moments of intuition. This meeting of the manual and the intellectual feels deeply enriching and profoundly nourishes my artistic language.
The imagery in your work often blends human figures, animals, and surreal landscapes. What draws you to these hybrid forms, and what narratives do they carry?
My works explore the intimate relationship between living beings and nature, their interconnections beyond a defined time and space. I do not seek to tell specific stories, and I believe my work is connected to the world of dreams and the depths of the unconscious. I simply place a few markers, a few clues that allow each person to construct their own story based on their frame of reference and their ability to associate ideas, letting their own narrative emerge.
I am often drawn to combining shapes or objects that do not appear to be connected, in order to create a world that is less expected and less binary, to blur boundaries and challenge our certainties.
Your practice extends beyond traditional painting into installation and live performance collaborations. How does interdisciplinary work inform your creative process?
Themes & Symbolism
The red necklace is a recurring motif in your exhibition, The Red Necklace of the Naked Queens. Could you elaborate on its symbolic significance in the context of femininity and societal expectations?
The red necklace symbolizes the feminine cycle, which alternates between pain and ecstasy, power and invisibility. In many places, being a woman remains a struggle. I wanted to give space to this intimate yet universal aspect, which both questions and moves through me. Pearl necklaces embody both a secret bond between women and the weight of an imposed role—somewhere between ornament and constraint, between transmission and burden.
Your work often explores themes of connection, vulnerability, and transformation. Do these themes arise organically, or do you intentionally construct narratives around them?
In my work, one can indeed find representations of motherhood, evocations of psychiatric illness, duality, the sacred, magic, rituals, sexuality, and the collective. I also paint trees, rivers, fountains, plants, and animals. Within these motifs, I incorporate the idea of hybridization, as if, deep down, nothing is exactly as reality leads us to believe—as if, behind appearances, things are more complex. I invite the viewer to question their own certainties.
I am interested in the concept of impermanence and in the Japanese notion of Ma—a concept that intertwines time and space into a single idea. Ma signifies interval, duration, space, and distance, referring to the subjective variations of emptiness that connect two separate objects or phenomena.
I have an endless reservoir of inspiration within me. These ideas surface and disappear from day to day—I activate and deactivate them, and they evolve indefinitely in response to my experiences.
I believe my work contains a tiny element of intentionality and a vast amount of improvisation. However, I pay close attention to rhythm, color, and composition, as I see them as a way to create space for the viewer’s eye to wander and construct their own narrative.
You’ve mentioned an interest in altered states of consciousness as a tool for creativity. How do these states manifest in your artistic process?
Hypnosis is simply a mental tool that complements my physical tools. This altered state of consciousness allows me to open my perceptions in a way that fosters creation—a state where one disconnects from one reality to connect with another, more internal, more meditative reality. It is a unique inner space where the thoughts I leave behind continue to bloom, and I can gather new ones, sort them, reorganize them, experiment, and take creative leaps. In this space, I seek the unexpected, the rare, and a sense of freedom that is difficult to attain.
Above all, hypnosis allows me to stop caring about what is expected of me.
The relationship between ornament and constraint is central to The Red Necklace of the Naked Queens. How do you see this duality reflected in women’s experiences across cultures?
Influences & Inspiration
Your artistic development has been influenced by diverse encounters, including your training with Hélène Laflamme and Xuan Chieu. What key lessons from these experiences continue to shape your work?
For two years, I learned oil painting on gessoed wood with Hélène Laflamme, following the traditional icon technique. This craft demands immense rigor and patience, especially in preparing the surfaces and grinding pigments before even beginning to create. For several weeks, the wood must be carefully prepared—applying seven layers of gesso mixed with animal glue, allowing each layer to dry, and delicately sanding in between. It is a demanding process, both physically and mentally, requiring deep concentration.
In Ho Chi Minh City, I spent three months learning lacquer techniques with Xuan Chieu, which follow a similar process. Multiple layers of resin are applied, left to dry, and then sanded down extensively, sometimes using the palm of the hand.
These experiences reinforced lessons I had previously learned through weaving and embroidery: a unique relationship with time, space, and material—very different from the way we usually experience them in daily life. They also helped me understand the importance and magic of alternating between highly technical phases and purely creative moments. This time devoted to meticulous, almost hypnotic and ritualized gestures is fertile; it lays the groundwork, much like a farmer cultivating the land before harvesting its fruits.
Having traveled extensively, particularly in Africa and Asia, how have these journeys informed your perspective as an artist?
Your works often resonate with current events and social issues. How do you balance personal expression with broader socio-political commentary?
It’s true that I listen to a lot of radio documentaries and biographical stories. I’m particularly interested in currents of thought in the humanities and social sciences, especially ecofeminism, which seems to me the best political path we can offer our children and the Earth.
With all these threads, I knit, sew, cook, raise my children, paint, draw, tinker, talk, dream, sleep, write, read, walk, see, create connections, and think.
Who are the artists, writers, or thinkers that inspire you the most?
My sources of inspiration are countless—literature, poetry, music, painting, dance, philosophy, theater… But if I had to choose just one, I must admit that I love going to contemporary circus performances. Over the past few decades, the world of circus has evolved tremendously, and I have seen shows that bring together all forms of art, along with science and philosophy.
Companies like Le Baro d’Evel, Johann Le Guillerm, Compagnie Jérôme Thomas, Nikolaus, Cirque Trottola, Cirque Pardi!—and I’m sure I’m forgetting many—create complete, total works that merge all art forms, science, and philosophy. These performances are so intense and dazzling that a single show can inspire me for years.
Exhibitions & Projects
Your participation in Art Central HK will introduce your work to an international audience in Asia. How do you anticipate different cultural contexts influencing the reception of your work?
I’ve learned not to expect too much and to receive the small signs of appreciation for my work as a gift. In an ideal life, I would love to have the opportunity, one day, to present different periods of my work (I’ve been painting for 25 years) in a beautiful space, with a lovely floor, beautiful lighting, intimate areas, and others that are more open. That would be the dream!
Your collaborations with other artists, institutions, and collectives seem essential to your practice. How do these collaborative projects differ from your solo work?
For two consecutive years, you’ve designed the visual identity of the Nantes Conservatory’s cultural season. How does working on applied art projects differ from your personal artistic practice?
The Role of Art in Society
Beyond your studio practice, you are involved in initiatives advocating for artists’ rights and ecological concerns. What role do you believe artists should play in shaping cultural and environmental discourse?
There are as many ways to be an artist as there are to be a citizen of the world. In my eyes, being an artist is already a deep and demanding commitment. Living from one’s art involves many compromises, and today more than ever, culture in all its diversity is threatened, just like education, healthcare, the climate, and many other essential aspects of our societies.
We must collectively rethink how to create a true “common good,” because, in my view, individualism is a destructive model. As an artist, a mother, and a global citizen, I feel the need to resist the erosion of life, the questioning of models based on emancipation through education and culture, the weakening of peace, critical thinking, and the ability to fight for building rather than destroying.
Art often serves as a space for reflection and resistance. Do you see your work as a form of activism?
I wish I could be more of an activist and militant, but like many, I face certain constraints. Ensuring daily life, feeding my children, keeping a roof over our heads requires me to dedicate part of my time to “survival” work. Juggling this necessity, my artistic practice, and family life leads to physical and mental fatigue, limiting my direct involvement.
However, I do my part in my own way, through my works, infusing them with my convictions and vision of the world.
Given your involvement in educational and participatory projects, how do you see the role of art education evolving in today’s society?
Offering children and young people the opportunity to explore materials, play with colors, create shapes, and share moments of reflection and collective creation around a common project allows them to discover values different from those promoted by television or social media.
Creating with one’s hands activates new areas of the brain and stimulates cognitive abilities that complement those developed in a traditional school setting. This brings out new skills, but also new emotions.
It is essential to give young people the chance to learn how to use their hands as much as their minds, to cooperate, to partner in valuing their complementarities, and to fully experience the emotions linked to creation. By strengthening our emotional system, we develop a deeper connection with the world around us.