About

Ariane Mercier-Beau (b. 1995, France–Iran) is a visual artist based in Yokohama, Japan. She graduated from the School of Art and Design in Grenoble, France, in 2021. Her practice centers on textiles and embroidery, incorporating text fragments into the work. Her work questions how daily life, personal experience, and cultural transitions can be recorded and understood through textile-based methods. She is currently an artist-in-residence at AIR Koganecho, where she has participated in both solo and group exhibitions.

Statement

My artistic practice is rooted in the use of textiles to examine how personal experiences, memory, and emotional states can be translated into material form. I work with fabric as a primary medium because it carries cultural, domestic, and tactile associations that allow me to address themes of intimacy, vulnerability, and everyday life in a direct and accessible way.

In recent years, my work has focused on constructing patchworks made from a range of textiles, including silk and materials collected during my moves between different countries. Onto these surfaces, I embroider short sentences taken from my diaries. This method allows me to bring private writing into a structured, visible format, turning personal reflections into data that can be read, measured, and experienced through touch. The combination of patchwork and text reflects my ongoing interest in how language, memory, and identity shift when moving between cultures.

Living between multiple contexts has made themes of displacement and adaptation central to my practice. I use textiles to consider how individuals negotiate these transitions and how emotional experiences are shaped by geography and cultural change. The works often hold a dual function: they reveal personal content while also creating a protective, soft framework that organizes and contains this information.

Through these embroidered textile pieces, my aim is to create environments where personal narratives can be understood in relation to broader social and collective experiences. By presenting intimate material in a structured and accessible way, I seek to contribute to conversations about mental health, migration, and the everyday impact of cultural movement within contemporary life.