Biography
Bourcart has been living in the United States since 2006 after growing up in Alsace, France. She identifies as French with Vietnamese heritage.
In her current multidisciplinary work with textiles, Bourcart uses unconventional materials such as cat fur, lint, and soil, elevating them into 2D and 3D objects, installations, and performances through techniques such as knitting, felting, and embroidery.
Bourcart's work has been exhibited internationally in numerous galleries and art venues, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, France, and Switzerland. Her photo-based works are part of the collections of museums in France and New York. Bourcart was invited to participate in several art fairs, including Art on Paper, Art Wynwood, and Flux Art Fair. She won the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for exceptional achievement in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in 2023. She has also been awarded numerous grants, such as the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council grants, Uniqlo Park Expressions grant, and The Puffin Foundation grant. She is one of the founders of the collective Art Forms Us created in 2020. After being a self-taught artist for 10 years, Bourcart currently holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts.
Artist statement
I come from Alsace, a region in France, where my paternal ancestors thrived in the textile industry. On the other hand, my maternal grandparents come from modest backgrounds. My Vietnamese grandfather was a ‘Cong Binh’ (soldier-worker), forcibly recruited from Indochina by France and sent there to work in bomb factories during WW2. It’s a silent part of history, and his own story remained ‘invisible’ despite the victory over the enemy. Until recently, there were no historic traces of his entrance to France, much like that of many people in similar circumstances.
My childhood was marked by the striking contrast in how my grandparents’ backgrounds were acknowledged. While my father's lineage was glorified, my grandfather’s contributions remained silent, almost hidden. This enigmatic disparity inspired me to explore the duality between showcasing and concealing and the visible and the invisible.
As a gleaner, I collect various textural materials from my domestic life, travels, or even from the streets. Often ordinary, overlooked and considered discarded or even repulsive they act as ‘skin’, ‘traces’ or ‘marks’ of our daily and routine life, carrying the imprints of our existence. I imbue these remnants with value, dignity and identity through craft techniques such as felting, sewing, knitting and embroidery.
Drawing inspiration from my family’s history and my own observations captured in a visual diary, I seek to answer questions about the tension between intimate and public, camouflage and exposure using various mediums, such as painting, drawing, performance and installation.
My work often is filled with encoded content, symbolizing my diverse cultural origins and underscoring the silence that has surrounded my grandfather’s history. My quest is to bridge the gap between the acknowledged and the hidden. It is an invitation to celebrate silenced aspects of the human experience, underlining their merit and revealing their contribution to our collective tapestry.