About Louise Jean

If you should ever wonder where Louise Jean is from, well to tell you the truth, it’s hard to pinpoint a single place. She was blessed throughout her life to have lived in many different countries including Switzerland, England, Scotland, China, Thailand, Myanmar and Chile; picking up diverse cultural influences along her way. But if you really need to define her by a location, it would be the vast, arid Karoo in the Northern Cape province of South Africa.

Close your eyes and picture a little farm house in the Great Karoo of South Africa, nestled in a unique and otherworldly landscape. A place where the diversity of animals and insects outweighs the number of humans, where a carpet of colourful wildflowers blossom in the spring time and blanket the plains, where you find rocky outcrops to climb during your afternoon walks, while a potjie cooks on the outside fire. This is where she loves to spend her time creating art, focusing on self healing, indulging in the great energies of the surroundings and counting the brightest stars at night. She leaves a part of her heart there every time she returns home to Cape Town.

Louise Jean uses brightly coloured threads as her paint, and a variety of fabrics as her canvas to create bespoke pieces. She has commissioned art pieces for a theatre production in Zurich, Switzerland (Edward Albee’s Zoo Story), hosted embroidery workshops in Cape Town, and exhibited her work at Kamers/Makers in Stellenbosch.

Her pieces are also scanned and printed in limited edition series’ on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm, so you are able to purchase prints of her creations to brighten up your space. For the most part, the size of the prints are relative to the size of the original embroidery work. Most of the original flower embroideries are quite small, therefore the prints of them are small, too. The larger originals, like Disco Dassie and Life’s a Peach have been printed on larger paper so that there is some cohesion between the size of the originals and the prints.