Annette Message is an accomplished artist from France with a practice that spans over the course of nearly four decades, whose main interest lies in ‘outsider’ art (amateur/children’s art). Her work includes the mediums of photography, sculpture, drawing, installation and even needlework. She chooses to use modest materials in her pieces, such as clothing, bandages, stuffed toys and so on, to create forms and shapes that suggest the complexity of human life and the shadowy ‘other’ in us all.
Her piece “Les Depouilles (Skins)” in 1997 showcased a series of children’s clothing and toys that she had taken apart, removed the stuffing and pinned up on the gallery wall. When commenting about the work Messager explained that she wanted to explore the similarities between what she saw as the final result on the wall and the shapes found in a Rorschach print.
