Hessie’s work comes to light today after many years, no doubt too many years, immersed in darkness and silence deriving just as much from the artist’s shyness as from her resistance to the art system; and above all, from her political stance and her deeply radical way of challenging and questioning many of the conventions in the system, which at the end of the day condemned her to oblivion and alienation.
The exhibition entitled Survival Art, presented at les Abattoirs, Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse in 2017 and in MUSAC in 2018, curated by Annabelle Ténèze and Sonia Recasens, rescued from oblivion the body of work that Hessie put together from the late 1960s, when she moved to the mill at Hérouval with her family, together with a series of nonconformist and transforming matters which underlie the production of an artist who in humbleness and silence took up a divergent position against the status quo, to such an extent that she did not take up any space therein.
