With Lydia Rump, material often comes before form. Her practice has been built over the years with whatever she has within reach: paper, cardboard, thread, fabric… Simple materials, sometimes collected or salvaged, which allow her to experiment, construct volumes and bring forms into being. Trained in fashion design, Lydia Rump initially chose this field for what it represented to her: a form of freedom and emancipation, the possibility of leaving her surroundings behind and discovering a world elsewhere, one that sparked her imagination. At the time, textiles were connected to this imaginary world of fashion. Little by little, they became something else: a material for exploration, freed from its original function.
After graduating, paper occupied a central place in her work for many years. She collects it, transforms it and sews it. The sewing machine becomes a creative tool in its own right, and textiles gradually return to her work through the gesture itself. This way of working is rooted in a certain economy of means. Lydia Rump does not necessarily look for the ideal material. She looks at what is there, what is available, sometimes what has been discarded, and tries to understand what it might become.
This is perhaps also what makes her encounter with French wool particularly interesting. The wool she uses was not produced to become an artistic material. It is first and foremost a co-product of livestock farming, coming from animals raised for their milk or meat. In a sense, it exists alongside the main production, its value still fragile and largely dependent on the sector’s ability to collect it, sort it, process it and find uses for it. Lydia Rump’s practice resonates with this story. As she does with the materials she finds around her, she starts with something that already exists. Her work is not about producing the material, but about giving it a new possibility, a new use value and a new way of being seen.
Today, she is particularly drawn to the original nature of wool: a natural, renewable material that exists before any transformation and carries a story of its own. The traceable French wools offered by Made in Town add another dimension to this relationship. Behind the yarn are a farm, a territory, animals, know-how and an entire chain of transformation. The material retains something of its origins while, in her hands, becoming something else.
Her recent work with tufting extends this exploration. The technique came after a period of embroidery on very small notebooks, in which she created fragments of writing using threads salvaged from her sewing machine. With tufting, she changes scale. The drawing leaves the notebook and unfolds into space. The gesture becomes broader and engages more of the body. Wool then makes it possible to draw directly with the material itself, bringing line, surface and texture into being at the same time. There is something deeply physical about this new stage in her work. After spending so long working on small formats, Lydia Rump is rediscovering, through tufting, a different relationship with space and with her own body.
From found material to transformed material, her work ultimately tells the same story: the possibility of looking differently at what is already there. Of considering a material not for what it was intended to become, but for what it might still become.
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