Annette Messager has described her work as both feminist and humanist and, more fundamentally, as “interested in life, the life of a woman, in speaking about ordinary things,” using ordinary materials in extraordinary ways. Very much a contemporary artist yet continuing the romantic traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, concerned with the mundane and the everyday yet fascinated by illusion and dream, highly attuned to contemporary culture yet deeply influenced by art outside the cultural mainstream, Messager has created a body of work that is at once accessible and obscure, spiritual and worldly, personal and universal.
In the early 1970s, Messager created a number of what she called “album-collections,” in which she attempted to define her own identity. These works, which make serious social statements while simultaneously evincing the trickster side of Messager’s practice, include a book-like component (the album), and a wall-bound component (the collection) comprising multiple similar elements, in this case hand embroidered proverbs. At the same moment Messager also made a number of independent albums (without wall work), including My Needlework. On page three of this album, Messager identifies herself both as collectionneuse (collector)—as if the sewing samples were historical relics or fetishes by others that she had gathered together—and as femme pratique(practical woman), whose own handiwork is proffered in the album. The following pages present line drawings of specific stitches identified by name, such as ma couture provisoire (my provisional seam—two patches of fabric held together by a safety pin), or mon point d’ourlet (my hemstitch), along with actual examples of the stitch in question. Messager thus exalts and subverts traditional women’s work at the same time. My Needlework is a unique work but is related to the album-collection with the same title, made in 1972, in the collection of the Musée de Grenoble in France.