Edwige Charlot: Thank you for taking the time to check out the installation. I’m really proud of how this piece came all together.
Kate Irvin: The title of this mesmerizing installation—God is good I won’t be dead, don’t be sorry. I will be protected god is good and great.—feels like something spoken quietly, to oneself, but insistently, like an incantation or prayer. Can you share where this language comes from and how ideas of faith, protection, and survival shape the work?
EC: Yes, the title is written like an incantation. The words were not spoken to me. They were written in a conversation between a relative and me. The words read like a reassurance and an affirmation. There is a repetition to them, a doubling back. God is good appears twice, at the beginning and at the end, like bookends.
The Haitian Kreyòl translation captures the calling/echo quality I tried to construct visually. Bondye bon, mwen p'ap mouri. Pa regrèt, mwen pral pwoteje, Bondye bon e li gran. The work is a world within a world, a refuge. Installed during the darkest month of the year, this site-specific installation was meant to act as a retreat. A world to lose yourself in during the daytime, and an invitation at night.
The space itself is shelter-like, calling. The title, the arch cutouts modeled after the cloth peristyle, create an opening or portal. The space expands up above and maybe beyond.
This piece, in particular, is a little different from the more altar-like installations I have made in the past. Mitigated by glass and diffused by a film, this piece is, for me, more about an interior experience than an external one. The glass creates a kind of distance. You are looking in or looking through. There is no direct contact, no offering to place.
While I use symbols, shapes, and a visual language rooted in Haitian Catholicism and Vodou, they serve as an organizational principle. Although they are specific, they are also found here in this neighborhood. Among the many churches and buildings of worship, there is a visual language that people in the world recognize. In addition to their religious symbols, we also already have a relationship with the storefront as a place. I leveraged our familiarity with this type of space to create a predictable entry point for the viewer. I hope that type of engagement/offering is special and consent-based. One that can be experienced from afar or up close with this piece, at one’s leisure, interest, and comfort.
I think faith shows up more as creating a devotional space than anything. Not faith as belief necessarily, but faith as practice. The act of making a space where certain feelings can happen. A space set apart.
I'm personally still working through the themes of protection and survival. I probably need more time to digest why I'm creating these shelter-like spaces or coverings that don't function as protection. They look like shelter but they do not keep anything out. They mark a space without securing it. Existing as evidence of survival. Again, still thinking through that.
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| Photo credit Sindayiganza Photography |
KI: The work unfolds as layers of sheer organza and voile that you describe as thresholds, “revealing, concealing, and refracting both memory and myth across space and time.” Indeed, the layered imagery of tropical vegetation has a surreal quality, mixing tantalizing lushness and airy sheerness with a density that pushes back. Please tell us more about how you’ve brought together photography, printing, and textiles to create this particular environment. Why did you choose these translucent fabrics as the foundation for your prints, and how do the embedded sequins and floating rhinestones contribute to the overall effect?
EC: As an artist printmaker, I have developed a multi-modal approach to creating installations and wall hangings that weave together photography, printmaking, and textiles. For this particular environment, I drew inspiration from the concept of a tunnel book, using the storefront space as a canvas to showcase my matrix-based method of making work.
The foundation of this installation is a series of translucent fabrics—tulle, organza, and voile—which I chose for their ability to function like printing layers or sequences. By printing on these fabrics using patterns and textures from my visual lexicon, I build up imagery in a way that echoes the printmaking process, with each layer operating as a discrete moment in time. When viewed together, these layers create a complex, cumulative image that shifts and dances, depending on the viewer's perspective.
My creative process begins with making plates and prints, which are then transformed into new plates or stencils to generate a fresh set of prints. This iterative cycle of fragmentation, reinterpretation, and reincorporation allows me to continually develop new imagery. While photography serves as a reference and inspiration for initial drawings, the imagery ultimately undergoes an admixture shift through this printmaking-driven approach. Much like the creole identity, it becomes hard to decipher the parts from the whole; it becomes something entirely new. From the window cutouts to the covered arches, I hope my printmaking sensibility comes through, especially with the use of sheer and transparent fabrics.
The arches and draped fabrics interact, creating many new compositions as you walk the length of the piece. stitched panels of layers of sequins, bedazzled fabrics, and appliques creating a series of monotypes. The layers reference time and space, even memory. As they hang from the top of the space, draped by my floating spirits or spectres. The fabric’s translucency gives form to the immaterial, allowing these presences to appear and disappear and engage with the openings into the space. The embedded sequins and floating rhinestones act as points of light and refraction. I love using sequins and rhinestones to mimic glints, glares, and shimmers. Like the dappled light coming through a canopy or the light dancing on the surface of water. I think it’s why I love Vodou drapos so much. I can’t help thinking about how this is the way I practice cangiante* in my work.
Cangiante is characterized by a change in color when a painted object changes from light to dark (value) due to variations in illumination (light and shadow). (Wikipedia)
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| Photo credit Sindayiganza Photography |
KI: The banner-like forms, seed bead edging, and sequins reference what you’ve called a “Creole craft vernacular.” Can you describe in more detail how these small and tactile details summon ancestral practices and help form a bridge to your explorations of diasporic identity?
EC: I use the term "Creole craft" both as a reference to my Caribbean heritage, to my Haitian (Kreyòl/Creole) roots, but also to describe the space I find myself working within, a space that holds both the old and the new, the inherited and the learned. The beading, the sewing, the handprinting—these are slow processes, slow in the way that prayer is slow, slow in the way that memory is slow. And then there is the laser cutting, the machine printing, the digital tools. The speeds are different, yes, but the approach remains the same. The care, the devotion, the attention—these carry through.
My practice has been shaped by my life as someone in the diaspora, shaped by the language from the home island, by the cultural practices and rituals that live in the body and move through the hands. I grew up oceans away from my ancestral homeland, in France, in the United States, always at a distance. And yet our physical home spaces held that world close. The portraits of saints on the walls. The clusters of rosaries hanging near doorways. These domestic altars, these quiet gatherings of sacred objects—they formed my earliest visual language.
My references are specifically rooted in Roman Catholic devotional traditions, in the quiet, meditative practice of repetition. Attaching beads becomes like counting the beads of a rosary, one after another, a kind of rhythm, a kind of prayer. This work exists in an imaginary space, a psychic space, where I am still finding ways to bridge what was passed down with what I am making now.
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| Detail of the middle cutout seen from three angles: from the left, straight on, and from the right. Photo credit: Sindayiganza Photography |
KI: The arched shape of the panels calls to mind religious architecture—chapels, altars, stained-glass windows—especially as the work transforms the storefront into what you describe as “a portal between worlds.” What inspired those arched forms, and how do they shape the spiritual or devotional tone of the installation as it’s encountered in the flow of everyday street life?
EC: I was excited to work with the storefront windows. I knew there would be an opportunity to play with how folx might engage with it. I had been observing the intersections for a little bit, noticing how folx in cars, pedestrians, and everyday people interact with the surrounding storefronts. There was/ is a natural draw to see what’s inside. That was one of the big motivators to add an element like the film that obstructs parts of it. The diffused, obscured color and shape created even more of an allure to investigate. The big payoff comes as you look into the arched shape (archways), the space expands and grows in all directions. There you find magic.
Continuing the aesthetic themes of Haitian Catholicism and Vodou, the archways are veiled with layers in and out of sequence, glimmers, and glints. The arch motif in my work can be viewed as a firmament between realms. I think that this is particularly meaningful within the context of a storefront, as the marketplace is a sacred space in West African and Caribbean cosmologies. I consider Kreyòl (Creole), especially through my queer lens, as an ever-evolving and boundless matrix of relation; an identity and experience of alchemy that bends time and space. Through archways, I am pursuing the alchemy of Kreyòl identity and experience in this installation and in my larger body of work.
The panels hover suspended between worlds—land and sea, past and becoming. The archways are like islands in a sea of color. Their translucency shifts with the ecological, historical, and cultural currents shaping the Kreyòl experience, where visibility remains unstable, truth layered, and presence spectral.
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| Photo credit Sindayiganza Photography |
KI: Light plays a huge role in how the work shifts from day to night. In the daytime, the sun’s reflection adds a dizzying element to the overlapping foliage of the printed textiles, while the nighttime illumination turns it into a beacon in the darkness. How did you approach light as an active collaborator, and what kinds of experiences were you hoping to create for people passing by at different times of day?
EC: Thank you for seeing the literal light! Yes, light is a collaborator in this work. The site-specific installation required a study of the space, place, and context. Early on, it was clear to me that light would be a major element in how the piece was experienced and interpreted. I started to pull in the visual vocabulary of store signage, displays, illuminated lettering, flyers, and wayfinding, which have a large presence on the street and throughout the neighborhood. It was important to me that this installation be place-based and respect the aesthetics and effect of its location.
Light, too, is an ever-present motif in Catholicism and Vodou that signifies the ethereal, breath of life, and many other things. It felt essential to maintain the continuity of light, no matter the time of day, as if it were a prayer or meditation. The guiding light of the installation helps the viewer navigate their experience as the work is enclosed by glass and obscured by translucence. The nighttime illumination of the work, specifically, also harkens back to the idea of refuge and invitation. What solace might it offer in the dark?
KI: You’ve said that your practice “resists fixed definition and embraces illegibility,” which I read as echoing Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s idea of the right to opacity: “I reclaim for all the right to opacity, which is not confinement. … Let it be a celebration.”
Can you say more about how these ideas play with how you’ve installed the work in the Dirt Palace storefront window in a way that it is there for all to view but never fully accessible?
EC: Again, I’m definitely still working through these ideas, so much of this answer will be me thinking aloud. I’m a visual artist, so I tend to work this out by making visual art. I’ll try to be succinct.
I think it’s important to state that I am an immigrant, a Black Queer person. For most of my life, I’ve existed as a person on the margins. My background and context are inseparable from the work that I make, and so when I write or talk about my work embracing illegibility, I’m talking about a few things. For one, I’m talking about how work can operate and be interpreted by kinfolk rather than non-kin, how illegibility can be an act of resistance, agency, and self-determination. I think that’s all I’ll say about it for now. To be continued.
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| Photo credit Sindayiganza Photography |
ABOUT THE INSTALLATION
Title: God is good I won’t be dead, don’t be sorry. I will be protected god is good and great.
Year: 2025,
Materials: Satin, tulle, organza, aluminum arches, frosted film, thread, sequins,
Dimensions: Spans 23.5 ft.
My practice emerges from a diasporic lens rooted in Caribbean cosmology and speculative geography, a perspective that resists fixed definition and embraces illegibility. Through layered veils embedded with spectral imagery and adorned with seed beads and sequins, I articulate a Creole craft vernacular that exists simultaneously as tactile and ephemeral. These sheer fabrics operate as thresholds, revealing, concealing, and refracting both memory and myth across space and time.
This storefront window installation transforms a neighborhood intersection into a portal between worlds. Multiple translucent fabric panels of organza and voile are suspended and backlit, producing gradients that shift from pale yellow-green to turquoise to deeper blue tones. The fabrics are printed with layered photographic imagery of tropical vegetation that overlaps and intersects, creating a dense, dreamlike, fragmented collage where Caribbean landscapes appear almost spectral, as if materializing through veils.
Light plays a crucial role, manipulating visibility as it passes through semi-transparent layers to create shifting effects: moments of revelation and concealment, glimmers and shadows. At night, the illuminated display radiates an ethereal luminescence against the surrounding darkness, transforming into a glowing beacon. During the day, it mirrors the familiar rhythm of adjacent storefronts, embedding the extraordinary within the everyday.
Materials carry symbolic weight in this work. Translucent organza and voile evoke permeable cultural boundaries, while the banner-like format and seed bead edging reference traditional Haitian crafts. The beads, small forms catching and reflecting light against gossamer fabric, bridge ancestral practices with contemporary identity exploration. Their interplay becomes a visual metaphor for the layered nature of diasporic identity, forming an interconnected constellation of veils, mirages, and dreamscapes from the margins.
The overall effect is both dimensional and ethereal, embodying physical presence and spiritual resonance while creating a space that bridges past, present, and imagined futures.
Edwige Charlot, b. 1987 Paris, France, is an artist printmaker of Haitian ancestry. As a descendant of Ayiti, Charlot borrows from printmaking, collage, and installation to create works from a visual Creole lexicon. Their transdisciplinary approach blends media and techniques to map the matrix, exploring the ecology of Creolization and Queer Afro-Latinx identities within and outside the Caribbean.
Charlot's work has received support from the Rhode Island Council on the Arts, the Interlace Grant Fund, the St. Botolph Club Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission. Recent awards and commissions include a three-year General Operating Support for Artists Fellowship by the Rhode Island Council on the Arts, a commission for the Providence Commemoration Lab, and a site-specific installation at the Fruitlands Museum as part of the New England Triennial.
They have been in residence at the Tides Institute & Museum of Art, BOOM Concepts, Queer Archive Work, and the Vermont Studio Center.
Photo credit: Argenis Apolinario, courtesy of Print Center New York
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
