Marguerite Roux

(b 1991South Africa. Lives and works in Cape Town)

Weaving is pivotal to Marguerite Roux’s practice. The repurposing of outdated phonebooks is her most lasting preoccupation and foundation of much of her work, provoking reflection on time, notions of progress and what remains tangible as a result. From the essential fragility of phonebooks’ non-archival paper, Roux alludes to the disappearing significance of its once valuable information.

“I spend hours cutting pages into strips and weaving them back together to communicate the value, strength and the ephemeral quality of the paper and technology,” says Roux. “I change the format, order and code to draw attention to the information that is so easily discarded as trivial. I gently force horizontal and vertical threads into a structure that registers my time and effort. By encapsulating the information in this document, the fragile importance of a nearly forgotten technology is savoured.”

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