ESTELLE YOMEDA

Presentation

Galerie Maria Wettergren is proud to present Estelle Yomeda first solo exhibition in France, Animal Vegetal, from November 6, 2025, to January 17, 2026.

Estelle Yomeda's artistic process is based on discoveries of ancestral knowledge and human encounters with craft people. This ethic feeds her creativity and leads her to launch, in 2018, her design studio Kente Project, through which she creates limited editions and unique works. Its name comes from its discovery of Kente, a traditional weaving that has spanned the centuries to establish itself as the identity and symbolic fabric of Togo and Ghana.

Fully handmade, Yomeda's signature works are sculptural furniture pieces, made of solid Togolese wood of an extraordinary beauty, characterized by their tactile quality and sensual silhouettes, reflecting the expertise of Togolese craftspeople. Highly organic, Yomeda's sculptural furniture pieces appear loaded with life and animistic presence. Yomeda's use of local Togolese wood species, such as Mélina, Neem or Cassia, are chosen for their sustainability, offering her tactile works a natural warm polychromy. Setting out to meet the artisans of Lomé, Estelle Yomeda is exploring the crossing of knowledge and intercultural exchanges, interweaving trans-generational memories and ancestral techniques, to transform pieces of furniture into contemporary relics.
Works
When Seeing feels like touching : A Round trip Paris - Lomé
Seloua Luste Boulbina
A quiet, tactile sensitivity seems to breathe from Estelle Yomeda's creations - by their curves that ask to be caressed, in the cords that call for touch. Smoothness and softness reign. A kind of delicate fauna, in the warm hues of wood, quietly makes its way into our interiors: insect-like mirrors in brown Macassar streaked with black cling to the walls. The outside world is destined to enter within, in lighter or darker shades. In Ceylon mahogany, for instance, the grain appears like a revelation - something one could never predict. The reddish-brown of the wood is traversed by veins, deeper or lighter. Royal lingué, a noble species considered "exotic" here in Paris, or melina - also known as white teak, once used for making packing cardboard - are treated like precious jewels. The rigor of form and the attention to color transform them into sensual, sophisticated sculptures. Clearly, hand and eye are equally engaged by these singular objects of harmonious lines. The artist's works thus awaken in us a sense of intimacy, heightened - through the act of polishing - by the experience of touch.

Wood is the artist's chosen material. She sources it in Togo. There, one encounters "sacred woods - or groves-". Among all living things, the tree is the being through which, in a privileged manner, the divinities reveal themselves. Their generic name, in certain regions, is ègolmyè or tew: tree. They are conceived as intermediaries between earth and sky - where dwells èso, the origin of all seeds, from which the first human descended. These groves mark the place where the human being first touched the earth. In one of them, a small hut shelters an altar: a mound of clay topped with fragments of broken earthen plates.

Elsewhere, a tree trunk may serve as altar. An initiatory pilgrimage through these groves - the ancestral lands - marks the passage into adulthood, inscribing the initiate within the terrain and the woods of ancestry. The tree is genealogical. Depending on intention or ritual, the wood may also be burned, darkened by fire. In this Voodoo region, a polychrome animism binds the vegetal, the animal, and the human. The inclusion of the artefact within the vegetal and the animal is the very signature of Estelle Yomeda's design.
Wood is the artist's chosen material. She sources it in Togo. There, one encounters "sacred woods - or groves-". Among all living things, the tree is the being through which, in a privileged manner, the divinities reveal themselves. Their generic name, in certain regions, is ègolmyè or tew: tree. They are conceived as intermediaries between earth and sky - where dwells èso, the origin of all seeds, from which the first human descended. These groves mark the place where the human being first touched the earth. In one of them, a small hut shelters an altar: a mound of clay topped with fragments of broken earthen plates.

Elsewhere, a tree trunk may serve as altar. An initiatory pilgrimage through these groves - the ancestral lands - marks the passage into adulthood, inscribing the initiate within the terrain and the woods of ancestry. The tree is genealogical. Depending on intention or ritual, the wood may also be burned, darkened by fire. In this Voodoo region, a polychrome animism binds the vegetal, the animal, and the human. The inclusion of the artefact within the vegetal and the animal is the very signature of Estelle Yomeda's design.

To inhabit the world, one must also be inhabited by it. The names of the objects conceived and drawn by Estelle Yomeda, and crafted by Lomé's artisans, bear witness to this. Lomé - the Togolese capital; Sokodé - the largest city in the central region; Aného - a coastaltown, once a Portuguese slave-trading post known as Little Popo; Assigamé - the vast market of Lomé. Afa recalls the voodoo divination system; Zo evokes zoology. Thus, a discreet geography unfolds among the exhibition pieces. A subtle Afropeanization circles back, drifting through the detours of the objects. Without ever quoting identifiable images of classical African art or modern design, Yomeda's work allows buried forms of perception to rise once more to the surface. These intertwine, forming a veil, an inner fabric - a network of associations that reemerges, almost incidentally, in her pieces. In this sense, the artist cultivates an art of memory: one where context illuminates the creation without dissolving its mystery.
In counterpoint to the stools and the small tables, the mirrors designed by Estelle Yomeda lean toward rhizomatic profusion. Beaded necklaces and the recurring colorful cords that weave through her seats emphasize the importance of bonds and connections. Shells, vegetal fragments, and beads of many kinds adorn the mirror, the quintessential source of reflection. Reflection: from the Latin reflexus, meaning "a turning back," as though the back-and-forth were our true way of moving forward. The mirrors - bare or adorned - presented here by the artist reflect a kind of bodily unity, which can be perceived in no other way. Their light, delicate ornaments, like their forms, evoke once again the vegetal, omnipresent here. Véyi names, for instance, a bean-shaped mirror - a reference to Togo's emblematic dish of stewed white beans, also called Véyi. Yomeda merges the "natural" and the "cultural," drawing upon roots that reach across two continents.

The subtlety of Estelle Yomeda's work, combined with the golden-handed mastery of Togolese artisans, flourishes within the Kente Project. Kente - a fabric of strong identity, woven from narrow strips sewn together in vibrant colors and intricate motifs - is elaborated as a language.

According to legend, this weave draws its inspiration from the spider's web and its intricate architecture. Kente stands as a symbol of West African heritage - particularly that of Ghana and Togo - which inspired the Black Aesthetic. Within this design of the in-between, at once African and European, kente becomes a

laboratory: a space for experimenting with materials, techniques, images, thoughts, memories - and, last but not least, with innovation itself.

- Seloua Luste Boulbina

Philosopher and political scientist, currently associate researcher (accredited to supervise research - HDR) at LCSP, Paris Cité University. Recent publications: Malaise dans la décolonisation - Terres éparses et îles noires, Les Presses du réel, 2025, and Sortir de terre, une philosophie du végétal, Zulma , 2025.
Exhibition Views
Estelle Yomeda — Animal Vegetal © Pauline Rougier
Digital Catalogue
- Publications
  Animal Vegetal
  Estelle Yomeda November 4, 2025