DABGAR GLOBES
2025
The Dabgar project is an exploration of a centuries-old and little-known craft, perpetuated in the province of Punjab in Pakistan. In the continuity of parchment, this craft transforms animal skin scraps into a continuous, resistant and translucent material. Using collagen from the skin as the sole binding agent, this craft is unique and ancestral, and is now in danger of disappearing. The Dabgar project aims to open up the formal language of this technique, which until now has been reserved for the creation of painted objects. It explores new uses, new scales and new sensory qualities of the material. It also opens up new perspectives for this craft, working to promote it, questioning production systems and striving for recognition for the artisans. Navigating between objects and sculptures, between emanation and silence, between gesture and living matter, the collection reveals the elemental beauty of the material.
The Dabgar golden lightings highlights the translucency of the material developed by the artisans, which bears traces of the craftsman’s gestures and the expressiveness of the parchments.The color varies depending on the origin of the skin and even on the salt used to preserve it. With the appearance of wax or the texture of the full moon, the silent form of the hand-sculpted object allows the material to express itself.
The Dabgar brown globes pays homage to jars, the primary forms of this ancestral craft. Camel skin, the original material used in this craft but now almost extinct, is reused here. The density of the object, the depth of the brown colour and the texture of the surface are always unique. Whether used as a pot or a sculpture, the globe evokes clay and earth, and seems itself to have travelled through the centuries.
Photo Credits Stéphane Ruchaud.
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